When the white Ryder van pulled up outside Fermilab’s main building, the phones at the usually sluggish security office started ringing off the hooks. Inside, a grinning producer was apologizing. The van belonged to the film crew for a new Imax movie, Cosmic Voyage, which purports to sketch the known universe from the quasar to the quark, from the big bang to the present. Still recovering after a late flight from Hawaii, where they had weathered 40-mile-an-hour winds, freezing temperatures, and altitude sickness to shoot one of the world’s largest telescopes atop Mauna Kea, the crew hadn’t realized that unattended vans outside federal buildings drew attention these days. The van didn’t contain any explosives, they explained, just miles of film and hundreds of pounds of camera equipment. They were there to observe, not destroy, and yes, they would move the van.
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When Rocky finally turned up with the crystal–he’d escaped to his office to squeeze in some work–Silleck began a low-key pep talk. “I’d like you to look over your lines a few times, then just throw them away. The most important thing is that it appear natural.”
An hour and 15 takes later, Rocky and the kids had lapsed beyond naturalness into pure fatigue. “That was perfect,” Silleck said to the group. “Now let’s do it again.” The shot employed a tulip crane–a large seesaw on wheels with the director of photography and the camera on one end, counterbalanced by lead weights on the other–that was riding on an uneven dolly track and causing the camera to vibrate. The crew sanded the tracks down, checked them with levels, and doused them with baby powder between shots. Despite the pleasant odor of a changing room that now pervaded, the camera still shook as the crane wheeled forward and lowered for the shot. After a few more takes, the weights were removed and a weary Tim Housel, the director of photography, climbed down from his perch.
“I’m worried about the salt and pepper shakers,” Housel said, squinting through the camera. Behind the atrium was a decidedly unphotogenic cafeteria. Large posters of the Horsehead nebula and other galactic vistas had already been erected to act as a backdrop, but the condiments were showing through. After the undesirables and their companion napkin holders were cleared out of the frame, the afternoon sun came crashing through the wall of windows in the rear. Large foam sheets were brought in to block the glare. Housel has no problem distinguishing the world in the camera from the world in front of the camera: “The real world’s in there,” he says, pointing to the eyepiece.
In the afternoon, the crew lugged their equipment over to one of the control rooms at the lab where physicists collect data from the collisions of protons and antiprotons in a four-mile superconducting ring of magnets called the Tevatron. Over the past year, researchers at the lab had sifted through trillions of collisions and identified what is believed to be the last and heaviest of nature’s building blocks, the top quark. A few who’d been recruited for the shot now sat patiently while a woman packed makeup on their faces. “Cosmetic Voyage,” they joked.
