“What we should learn about the expedition of Lewis and Clark is that this is our heritage and that this is the kind of spirit we should have with the challenges that we face in life,” said CBS newsman Charles Osgood yesterday at Boston Latin High School, where he was joined by Mayor Thomas Menino, National Geographic filmmaker Erica Immucci and 100 students to get a sneak preview of the new IMAX film, “Lewis ‘ Clark: Great Journey West.”
The Lewis and Clark film, produced by the National Geographic Society, is currently being shown at the Museum of Science for the bicentennial of the historic journey.
“We might have had a very different United States … without Lewis and Clark,” Osgood told the group of 100 students during a short speech about the new film.
“Stephan Ambrose wrote that these men had ‘undaunted courage,'” Osgood continued. “Imagine coming to mountains and not knowing what was beyond … crossing them only to find more mountains and more and more.
“Lewis and Clark were so important to the formation of this country,” Osgood said. “Change is not something that happens now and then, something delineates times of change. And this was certainly one of those times.”
Following Osgood’s speech, National Geographic Associate Producer Erica Immucci showed the short documentary, The Making of Lewis ‘ Clark.
The documentary showed behind-the-scenes shots of how the film was made to fit the precise expedition journals of the two explorers as well as the large-scale IMAX theatres. According to Immucci, there are only three IMAX cameras in the world and they use a special film that is almost the size of a postcard in order to show such extraordinary scenes.
“We hired a location scout to go on the Lewis and Clark trail and find the best views — the ones that looked unchanged from modern day — so most of the scenes are from the actual trail that Lewis and Clark went on,” Immucci told the audience. “The Rocky Mountains come to life; that’s how big they look on screen.”
Immucci also explained how different aspects of the film went into production, from working with trained grizzly bears to creating realistic costume designs for the explorers and their Native American acquaintances to filming in unique ways such as sliding the IMAX camera down a steep cliff to illustrate one of Lewis’ near accidents.
Immucci was one of the producers responsible for keeping the film as accurate as possible by communicating with historical societies and Native American tribes and researching the original journals. “We used them as our Bibles,” she told students.
The actual journey ,most of which was on foot through all extremes of weather imaginable, began in 1803, took 18 months and covered 14,000 miles from Missouri to Oregon. The makers of the film had much easier conditions and although they traveled the historical trail backwards for filming, they traversed most of the miles in cars and trucks.
“It took longer to make the film than it took Lewis and Clark to make the journey,” joked Osgood, who is doing a series of vignettes on the exploring duo for his radio show, The Osgood Files.
“Generally it was pretty good; I enjoyed the film,” said Paul Larocque, a senior at Boston Latin. “It was good that Charles Osgood was here to give his input on the film.”
“I want to see the film now that I’ve seen this documentary,” said Kevin Bernazzani, another senior. “It looks really interesting.”
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