Image: SV Studios
One man’s journey to make a film
to the United States to study filmmaking. Today he’s
When filmmaker Stephen Van Vuuren first saw images realizing both dreams and taking audiences along for
of Saturn retuned by the Cassini spacecraft, he saw the ride.
“In Saturn’s Rings” is a non-profit film which animates
something more in them. He not only saw the beauty
over a million photographs from a variety of sources
of the ringed planet, he saw a motion picture camera
including those from Cassini which first inspired Van
flying through space.
Van Vuuren grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, Vurren. Some frames of the movie are from a single
with dreams of being an astronaut. He was accepted photograph. Others, such as the movie’s visualization
at MIT to major in astrophysics, but Stanley Kubrick’s film of the Big Bang incorporate thousands of images from
“2001: A Space Odyssey” changed his mind. He came the Hubble Space Telescope. The film also draws from
imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Messenger, Suomi NPP, Solar Dynamics
Observatory, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter,
Venus Express, Rosetta, Dawn, Galileo, Voyager and Apollo programs.
A subject this big requires a big presentation. The film is being made for giant screens
like IMAX theaters, fulldome planetariums,
and 4k digital cinemas. This requires a tremendous amount of storage space on the computers being used to create the film.
“The final film will consume about 50 to 65
Terrabytes” says Van Vuuren. That’s enough
space for over 200 Blu-ray discs, 100,000 CDs
or the text in about 250 million books.
Van Vuuren describes the film as a work
of art created through science. A soaring
performance of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for
Strings” by the Greensboro (North Carolina)
Stephen Van Vuuren works in his basement studio on the IMAX film “In Saturn’s Symphony accompanies the audience as
Photo: SV Studios they fly along with the Apollo 17 astronauts,
Rings” which will be released this July.
By Tony Rice
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