Two new IMAX movies, “Penguins” and “Hidden Universe,” will show daily from Sept. 6 through Jan. 2.
“Penguins” shows Monday-Saturday at 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.; Sunday at noon, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Martinis & IMAX special screenings: Fridays at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. (Through November only.)
“Hidden Universe” shows Monday-Saturday at 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.; Sunday at 1 p.m., 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.; Martinis & IMAX special screenings: Fridays at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. (Through November only.)
IMAX tickets are $13 for adults, $12 for students/seniors, $11 for children, and $8 for Museum members. Double-Feature IMAX tickets are $21 for adults, $19 for students/seniors, $17 children and $13 for Museum members.
Fernbank Museum of Natural History, 767 Clifton Road NE, Atlanta. 404-929-6300; www.fernbankmuseum.org
Distant worlds are brought home to Atlanta viewers in two new IMAX movies being premiered at the Fernbank Museum’s five-story IMAX theater.
The stories they tell couldn’t be more different, but each demonstrates the power of documentary film to entrance with the sometimes-fearful beauty of the natural world.
“Penguins”
Like “March of the Penguins,” but with a slightly sunnier outlook, “Penguins” follows a King penguin couple on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, a place that is considerably farther south than Valdosta.
King penguins, who form a serial monogamous bond over the course of the 16-month breeding cycle, share responsibility for rearing their offspring. The father balances the single egg on the tops of his feet, keeping it warm in the folds of his stomach, as the mother leaves to feed in the deep ocean and store undigested fish and cephalopods in her gut.
Then the mother takes over, while the father goes off to feed, traveling as far as 250 miles from home. The adult penguins regurgitate their catch into the mouths of the youngsters. During the coldest winter months the seas are too dangerous for fishing, and the entire family must fast.
Enlivened with the boisterous narration of documentary filmmaker David Attenborough, “Penguins” pays attention to the life-or-death drama in the shadow of predators such as the leopard seal and giant skua birds, without dwelling on the downside. Instead, it uses that tension to heighten appreciation for the protagonists, whose endearing courtship rituals make them an irresistible romantic couple.
“Hidden Universe”
The giant IMAX screen is the right place for this spectacle, a meditation on the immense wonders of the celestial world.
It opens with astronomer Jonathan Whitmore, whose natural habitat, an observatory in the wildly remote mountains of the Atacama desert in Chile, is almost as unearthly as the planetary bodies that he examines.
The film uses images from Chile’s Very Large Telescope, the Hubble space telescope and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE space camera. Reinterpreting those images with proprietary software, the filmmakers render data from those scopes as three-dimensional structures, and in the HiRISE pictures from Mars, the effect is breathtaking.
In a conversation from his Melbourne, Australia, home, director Russell Scott described the process of marrying visual and digital information in the images. He said that in the Mars section, for example, his CGI experts used the topographic information gathered by the HiRISE camera to digitally construct a sculptural planetary surface, then mapped the visual information onto that digital skeleton.
“We wanted to give a feel like we’re flying along Mars in a helicopter,” he said.
The steeply raked IMAX auditorium essentially hangs its viewers on a wall opposite the huge 72-foot-wide screen, enhancing the sense of being swallowed by the images of eternal space.
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