Darren Aronofsky’s new film ‘Postcard from Earth’ airs exclusively at the Sphere in Las Vegas and it is one of the greatest moviegoing experiences on the planet. Once you get over the high cost of tickets, being immersed in the 18K resolution footage is unlike anything anything you have ever seen before.
Aronofsky, who received an Academy Award nomination for directing Black Swan, was at the forefront of the operation. He hand his team traveled the world to take viewers on a 50-minute journey “deep into our future as our descendants reflect on our shared home.”
It takes viewers to the Grand Canyon, all of the way out to India, and everywhere in between.
The Sphere is a technological marvel.
And it’s not just the visuals!
One particular scene filmed at an opera house in Parma, Italy features a solo violinist. Detail is so diminutive that the immersive audio allows you to literally hear her fingers on the strings.
The ground-breaking film is pushing the limits of technological capabilities. There has never been anything else like it in cinematic history. Even Aronofsky himself was blown away by the finished product.
With a capacity of 18,000, the Sphere auditorium stands 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide. All of the images are displayed in 18K on the world’s largest LED screen, which is about the size of four football fields. A whopping 164,000 surround-sound speakers make up the audio system.
The revolutionary venue required innovative film machinery. Darren Aronofsky recently explained what went into Postcard from Earth from a technological standpoint and provided a better understanding of the process. It’s intense!
The camera outputs 32 gigs per second. So like, a movie on your hard drive is three gigs…
This is 32 gigs per second to make an 18K image.
— Darren Aronofsky
The camera required for the film is massive.
It took about 12 people to turn this camera on because there was fans, and overheating…
— Darren Aronofsky
Not only was the camera huge, as was the finished product.
The final file of the film is what they call ‘half a petabyte.’
That’s after terabyte, is a petabyte.
— Darren Aronovsky
To make the entire process even more complicated, Aronofsky didn’t even get to see the screen at the Sphere until August. He and his team had work on the film without knowing exactly how it would translate to the venue itself.
Ultimately, the result was better than anything anyone could have imagined.