HYDE PARK — There was a wave of “whoas” as images of Yellowstone National Park stretched across the Museum of Science and Industry’s five-story Omnimax screen for the first showing of “National Parks Adventure” on Friday.
Director Greg MacGillivray was in the audience at the museum, 5700 S. Lake Shore Drive, watching on Friday as kids oohed and aahed over the time-lapse footage of national parks as Robert Redford narrated the history of the parks system.
“That’s part of the reason I make films, to see curiosity in a child’s eyes,” MacGillivray said.
But the kids in the audience had no idea what MacGillivray went through to get the shots for the 45-minute movie that follows world-renowned mountaineer Conrad Anker on a tour through the national parks.
Reporter Sam Cholke talks about the feeling of watching an Omnimax movie.
MacGillivray and his crew would grab the 350-pound cameras necessary to shoot an Ominmax movie and load them into a hand cart and haul them up to a mile into the wilderness in the middle of the night searching in the darkness for a small stake MacGillivray had placed the day before to mark the shooting location.
“We’re always having to leave at least at 4 a.m., sometimes 3 a.m.,” MacGillivray said.
He said sometimes he would have no idea if he was even shooting the right thing because the time-lapse cameras would have to start rolling while it was still dark and there were limited ways to check the framing of the shot.
The audience couldn’t seem to tell if any of the shots were slightly off. They gasped as a helicopter shot panned around Anker and two other climbers summiting the Three Penguins, a 500-foot cliff in Arches National Park in Utah.
MacGillivray said that shot was probably the most stressful for him.
MacGillivray’s partner, aerial filmmaking expert Jim Freeman, died in 1976 in a helicopter crash while shooting in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.
“If I looked stressed, it was because I was stressed,” MacGillivray said. “It was probably the most stressful, you can get killed very easily by a helicopter.
He said he learned from Freeman’s death, which happened two days before the opening of MacGillivray’s arguably most successful, “To Fly!," which has been shown for 40 consecutive years at the National Air and Space Museum.
MacGillivray said he took every possible safety precaution he could think while filming in Utah as the helicopter circled the climbers jumping from peak to peak.
He said the risks are worth it because the Omnimax film is the closest some viewers will ever get to seeing many of the nation’s massive parks.
The film is shown daily at 10 a.m., noon and 2 p.m. and requires an extra timed ticket along with the cost of museum entry.
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