''Cosmic Voyage'' is a 1996 short

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

produced in the

IMAX IMAX is a proprietary system of high-resolution cameras, film formats, film projectors, and theaters known for having very large screens with a tall aspect ratio (approximately either 1.43:1 or 1.90:1) and steep stadium seating. Graem ...

format, directed by

Bayley Silleck Bayley may refer to: * Bayley (wrestler) (born 1989), American professional wrestler * Bayley (surname) * Bayley House * Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID), used to sample the intellectual growth of infants and toddlers * Bayley Seton H ...

, produced by Jeffrey Marvin, and narrated by

Morgan Freeman Morgan Freeman (born June 1, 1937) is an American actor, director, and narrator. He is known for his distinctive deep voice and various roles in a wide variety of film genres. Throughout his career spanning over five decades, he has received ...

. The film was presented by the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

's National Air and Space Museum, and played in IMAX theaters worldwide. The film is available in the

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kin ...

format.

Synopsis

''Cosmic Voyage'' has a format similar to Eva Szasz's ''

Cosmic Zoom ''Cosmic Zoom'' is a 1968 short film directed by Robert Verrall and produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It depicts the relative size of everything in the universe in an 8-minute sequence using animation and animation camera shots. Sy ...

'', and

Charles and Ray Eames Charles Eames ( Charles Eames, Jr) and Ray Eames ( Ray-Bernice Eames) were an American married couple of industrial designers who made significant historical contributions to the development of modern architecture and furniture through the work of ...

's classic ''

Powers of Ten A power of 10 is any of the integer exponentiation, powers of the number 10 (number), ten; in other words, ten multiplication, multiplied by itself a certain number of times (when the power is a positive integer). By definition, the number one is ...

'' educational video. All were based on the 1957 book ''

Cosmic View ''Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps'' is a 1957 book by Dutch educator Kees Boeke that combines writing and graphics to explore many levels of size and structure, from the astronomically vast to the atomically tiny. The book begins with a ph ...

'' by Dutch educator

Kees Boeke Cornelis "Kees" Boeke (25 September 1884 3 July 1966) was a Dutch reformist educator, Quaker missionary and pacifist. He is best known for his popular essay/book '' Cosmic View'' (1957) which presents a seminal view of the universe, from the ga ...

. ''Cosmic Voyage'' takes viewers on a journey through forty-two

orders of magnitude An order of magnitude is an approximation of the logarithm of a value relative to some contextually understood reference value, usually 10, interpreted as the base of the logarithm and the representative of values of magnitude one. Logarithmic di ...

, beginning at a celebration in

Venice, Italy Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...

and slowly zooming out into the edge of the

observable universe The observable universe is a ball-shaped region of the universe comprising all matter that can be observed from Earth or its space-based telescopes and exploratory probes at the present time, because the electromagnetic radiation from these obj ...

. Then the view descends back to Earth, and later zooms in upon a raindrop on a leaf on a hoop used in the Italian celebration, down to the level of subatomic particles (

quark A quark () is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All common ...

s). In addition, the film offers some brief insight on the

Big Bang The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from t ...

theory,

black hole A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can defo ...

s, and the development of the

Solar System The Solar System Capitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar ...

. It also simulates a journey through

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory specializing in high-energy parti ...

Tevatron The Tevatron was a circular particle accelerator (active until 2011) in the United States, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (also known as ''Fermilab''), east of Batavia, Illinois, and is the second highest energy particle collider ...

particle accelerator A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel electric charge, charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined particle beam, beams. Large accelerators are used for fun ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

, where an atom collision is depicted.

Awards

''Cosmic Voyage'' was nominated for a 1997

Academy Award The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment in ...

under the category of Best Documentary Short Subject.

References

External links

* 1996 films 1996 documentary films 1996 short films 1990s 3D films 1990s English-language films 1990s short documentary films 3D documentary films 3D short films American short documentary films Films scored by David Michael Frank IMAX documentary films IMAX short films 1990s American films {{short-documentary-film-stub