Samsara (2011 film)

Samsara is a 2011 nonnarrative documentary film, directed by Ron Fricke and produced by Mark Magidson, who also collaborated on Baraka 1992, a film of a similar vein. Samsara was filmed over five years incountries around the world. It was shot in 70 mm format and output to digital format. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and received a limited release in August 2012.

Samsara is directed by Ron Fricke and produced by Mark Magidson. The pair had collaborated on Baraka 1992 and reunited in 2006 to plan Samsara. They researched locations that would fit the conceptual imagery of samsara, to them meaning birth, death and rebirth or impermanence. They gathered research from peoples works and photo books as well as the Internet and YouTube, resources not available at the time of planning Baraka. They considered using digital cameras but decided to film in 70 mm instead, considering its quality superior. Fricke and Magidson began filming Samsara the following year. Filming lasted for more than four years and took place incountries across five continents. Three years into filming, the pair began assembling the film and editing it. They pursued several pickup shoots to augment the final product.The crew used three 70mm cameras for filming two cameras manufactured by Panavision and one specialty timelapse camera designed by Fricke. While the scenes were captured on 65 mm negative film, they were output to Digital Cinema Package DCP, a digital output. Magidson described the process, Were doing a combination of what we think is the best of both technologies, the best way to image capture and then the best way to output. Once we get into the digital environment, were able to refine the imagery, were able to save shots that wed have to otherwise trash really for various reasons. Where they cut their negatives for Baraka, the negatives for Samsara were scanned then worked on digitally. The pair used the Telecine process to format the film to ProRes for the editing process and used Final Cut for editing. ........

Source: Wikipedia