Download a Quicktime of Mark Osborne's More. 618 K. ©Bad Clams Productions.

All images © Bad Clams Productions.

When I embarked on my new film More, I approached it from a very basic and unassuming angle: I wanted to tell a story. What ultimately made this film a different type of journey to embark upon, was that we were breaking ground by telling a stop motion story on the Giant Screen, 70mm/15perf, or IMAX format as it commonly known, for the first time.

My original plan for More was to shoot it as a 35mm follow up to my first short Greener. I had faculty access to equipment and space at CalArts, and private funding lined up from a longtime family friend Steve Kalafer, but then some amazing luck came my way. I received a call from some old CalArts chums Debra Callabresi and Kelly Moren. They called on behalf of their involvement with the Large Format Cinema Association's (LFCA) animation and experimental film task force to see if I was interested in the Giant Screen. They wanted to blow up some stop motion to the 70mm/15perf format. After telling them of my plans to shoot More over the summer on 35mm they decided to approach Christopher Reyna, president of the LFCA and general manager of IMAGICA USA, a large format post-production company. He valued the project and called in enough favors and donated services from LFCA members to allow us to shoot on the Giant Screen format. What a truly amazing opportunity.

Mark Osborne.

Going to 70mm
When everything was lining up and it was becoming a reality to shoot in this enormous medium, I had to take a step back and decide if my film idea was fitting to the format. I looked at my storyboard and animatic to decide if my concept was appropriate. Would my style of filmmaking work on this enormous screen? Would I just be converting my 35mm film idea? I found I was actually able to expand and elaborate on my original themes and tailor fit my subject comfortably to this gigantic 70-foot screen. I was intrigued and excited at the idea of taking a ten-inch puppet made out of clay, wire and latex and bringing it to life on a screen six and a half stories tall. I also realized that the type of immersion offered by the Giant Screen would help lend to the emotional involvement needed to pull off my highly dramatic and involving story. Much to my surprise, stop motion in all of its organic and handmade beauty was truly breathtaking and amazing on this scale. Many people consider stop motion a dying art form, so what better way to keep it alive then to bring it into this new format, and celebrate its uniqueness by immersing the audience in all of its beauty like never before.

With the Herculean task before us the days got much longer and the crew doubled overnight. Line Producer Shannon Lowry organized Production Designer Rick Orner and the model department/assistant animators David J. Candelaria and Nick Peterson. Keith Lowry, a.k.a. the Camera Department, and I scrambled to get all the donated equipment coordinated so that we could begin shooting ASAP. The Pioneer x-15 camera (donated by Graphic Films) and CalArts' motion control rig (donated by alumnus Thomas Barron of Image G) were unfortunately incompatible. It took a lot of chewing gum, paper clips and spit to get all of it working together. Special lenses converted from large format still photography Hasablad lenses were needed to shoot our models. We lucked out and got a 50mm lens, which is roughly similar to an 18mm lens in 35mm film shooting, that could focus 12 and 1/2 inches from the film plane (three inches away from the end of the lens). This was perfect because the camera needed to get inside the rooms and locations or the audience would never feel any depth from the miniatures. As much as possible we used the 50mm lens and close proximity to make the viewer feel as though they were inside this world.