Douglas Trumbull's UFOTOG project

[LongTomH]

Douglas Trumbull has had close to half a century in films as director, special effects supervisor, and inventor. He's worked on ground-breaking films like: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Silent Running, and Blade Runner. At 71, he's still working on innovative ideas like immersive media for theaters and theme park rides.

His latest project: UFOTOG (short for UFO photography) combines Trumbull-developed immersive media concepts with his interest in UFOs. This will include:

• A short feature shot in high-definition, 3D, at 120 frames-per-second, and
  
• a project for photographing UFOs.

His return to directing is attracting attention in Hollywood as well as the UFO community:

The soft-spoken director then changed the subject back to his work. UFOTOG, an acronym for UFO photography, is “based on a longer screenplay that I have” that tells the story of a man’s attempt to photograph an alien spacecraft. “He’s very smart, a serial entrepreneur, like Elon Musk. So he has the wherewithal to get a really good camera and build a system on a mountaintop.” The photographer is played by actor Ryan Winkles.

...........//snip

The projects underscore the director's belief that films shot at ultra-high resolution and frame rates -- and supported by immersive sound, such as Dolby Atmos, which will be used on UFOTOG -- will deliver a kind of experience that will draw more people to movie theaters. “What you see on the screen is less like a movie and more like a live event. The screen becomes a giant window onto reality,” he said, noting that this informs the creative choices, as it creates a more first-person experience.

Watch Trumbull's web page for updates on the project.

[frogmarch]

1. Interesting!

If the mobile UFOTOG unit would happen to be in the right place at the right time to photograph one or more of these “transitory anomalies,” it would be very cool. I gathered while watching the video that the UFOTOG team would respond right away to reported UFO sightings and be able to set up the unit quickly and start photographing. Even so, by then the objects could be gone.

It’s still very interesting.