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Eight minutes of Canada

Sherpa Cinemas instrumental in Flyover Canada attraction, opening June 29
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High Flyers Pilot Kelsey Wheeler, Aerial DP John Trapman, and Director Dave Mossop from Sherpas Cinema geared up to shoot in the Westcoast of Canada. Photo submitted

Dave Mossop of Whistler-based Sherpa Cinemas has collected footage for the company's unique ski films in all kinds of wild and remote locations, but his recent work for FlyOver Canada — a new Vancouver attraction opening on June 29 — was a challenge he'll not soon forget. Everything from the camera gear to the camera mount to the screening room they used to test footage was a custom job, and needed to be to deliver an experience rich enough to blow minds.

If you've ever been to Soarin' Over California at Disneyland, you'll get the general concept — people are hoisted from the ground on rows of moving chairs and then manipulated into a screen that's curved like the inside of a 20-metre globe — picture a ping pong ball cut in half — to surround them on all sides, and top to bottom, with moving images. The film itself is Canada, flying through a mix of dramatic landscapes and Canadian scenes.

"It's one of the most immense projects we've ever done, and everything about it is a completely custom job," says Mossop. "Everything from the camera, to the helicopter mount, to the screen, to the editing style and the post-production work is a total, cutting edge experiment. It was huge, and just incredibly challenging to figure out all of the technical aspects to get it all right."

The camera used is a Phantom 65mm IMAX camera with a huge custom chip on it. The camera shoots at 60 frames per second at 4K resolution — a video format with about four times the number of pixels as a 1080 high definition picture.

"Every camera shot we took is basically 50GB to 100GB, which is a ponderous amount of data to deal with, as you can imagine. Typically we use a really high-end digital camera when we work, but the largest shots are maybe a gig or two — this is 50 times that."

They had to customize an Eclipse Gyro Stabilized Aerial Camera System mount to fit on the front of the helicopter, create a custom projector for both the screen and editing room (created at Sherpa Cinemas' studio in Whistler), and use the top computers to process all the data.

The finished film consists of about 18 shots, and it took about a year to get footage from all the different seasons in all the diverse shooting locales across Canada that were featured in the project. If that wasn't difficult enough, Mossop insisted that at least one of the shots had to come from the far north of Canada and feature the Northern Lights — to do it they had to rent a Lear jet with a custom glass nose and fly all the way to Churchill, Manitoba, (a region known for its polar bears) to stage shots of the far north.

"It was a totally surreal experience, to be sitting in this jet just a few metres above the mountains at sunrise," says Mossop.

While Mossop has shot in the most beautiful mountain ranges around the world, he says there was one area in particular that took his breath away.

"Everybody has to go to Gros Morne National Park (in Newfoundland)," he says. "It's one of the most spectacular places I've ever been. It's just a specular environment with an amazing vibe. There's this massive, glacially carved canyon that is just incredible. It's one place I would definitely go back to."

Mossop says his studio was picked based of their work in ski films. At first he wasn't sure what to make of the FlyOver Canada, the whole thing seemed too crazy to be real.

"We get a lot of guys calling with these crazy products and huge, elaborate plans but with very little money to pull them off," laughed Mossop. "But I listened because it sounded interesting and we agreed to meet. It was funny, because they didn't tell us what their budget was for those first few meetings, before we finally met in this boardroom in Vancouver and there were all these guys in suits and ties — at that point I was still kind of telling them how it was, but they finally gave me a budget plan and it was like, 'these guys are serious.' I behaved a little differently at the next meeting, that's for sure.

"I have to hand it to those guys, it's a pretty ingenious concept. The whole show is really impressive, and I do highly recommend that everybody go there, even just to see the structure they built. That alone is worth the trip to the city."

The entire show is about 30 minutes, starting with a segment called Uplift by Montreal's Moment Factory, which sets up the main show.

The total budget for the operation, including the construction of a new facility near BC Place, was around $16 million.

Whistler will not be featured in FlyOver Canada. The original script called for an ice hockey game on Green Lake to be filmed, with the camera continuing up and over the local mountains, but the producers had to switch the venue after temperatures warmed around the end of January and the quality of ice deteriorated. Instead, they filmed that segment at Joffre Lakes.

Pique caught up to Stephen Geddes of Soaring Attractions, the company responsible for FlyOver Canada, back in January when the Whistler shoot was supposed to take place. He had this to say about his attraction:

"Disney's (Soarin' Over California) film is now 11 years old and the technology has improved a lot since then," he said. "Our seats do more, with six degrees of movement as opposed to two. We won't be using the full capability for the first film, it's more about scenic and the gentle motion of the seats, but we hope to use some of the more extreme functions of our seats for other experiences we may bring to the theatre down the road — Halloween or Christmas experiences that are directed at kids, or all-ages things."

Tickets to the attraction are $19.95 for adults, $17.95 for seniors, students and youth and $14.95 for children (or $18.95, $17.05 or $14.19 for online sales). The website is www.flyovercanada.com.