When the real and the unreal meet

Remember your childhood outings to the planetarium or IMAX. The Satosphère offers a different cinematic experience, one that is also immersive: you do not know where to look, you ask questions, and you discover. The Société des arts technologiques (SAT) celebrates Printemps numérique with a quartet of urbancreations from here and abroad: Polynômes. Heighten your

perceptions and fully experience the moment.

Christian Morissette is an artist in residence at the SAT. There is no shortage of wordplay for his new short film Envol: images that make you soar, cinema that takes flight, scenes that steal the show. They may be clichés, but these descriptions still apply to his experimental work. The project grew out of a research-creation master’s degree in experimental media at UQAM. He wanted to bridge conventional cinema and the hemispherical environment, and he sees the SAT initiative as a valuable way to make the exploration of computer-generated images and real footage accessible in anartistic form.

The director pays tribute to early cinema and to the Cinechamber group. In Envol, viewers are transported into an old movie theatre, watch the Wright brothers’ first airplane flight, then move into a modern airport for their own takeoff. The passage between past and present, between two-dimensional cinema and immersive video capture, is successful. From the cockpit, we receive instructions from the control tower while admiring the landscape.

The image is projected in a spherical format. Wherever the viewer looks—up, behind, left or right—they are at the heart of the work. To achieve this

[youtube id=”4xEHAab5cec” width=”428″ height=”240″ autoplay=”no”]

immersion, a complex 360-degree shooting technique was developed. Maxime Lortie and Alexandre Lanthier complete the production team. Envol is expected to travel to festivals. For Christian Morissette, this is certainly one future of cinema: being completely surrounded by creation, entering the film and forgetting reality.

The new spring immersive program in the Satosphère explores new languages of immersive video capture. The Sublime by Sandra Harnisch-Lacey, BreakFAST by Sönke Hahn, Envol by Christian Morissette, Alexandre Lanthier and Maxime Lortie, and Listen Carefully by Sebastian Hilgetag and Marie Havemann are on the bill. April 2 to 18, 2014, 7 p.m., Tuesday to Friday, Satosphère, 3rd floor. Duration: 30