Colin Low and Wally Gentleman

Collin Low is arguably the second most crucial first-generation filmmaker at IMAX and one of the most essential filmmakers in Canada. Born on July 24, 1926, he was an animation director and documentary filmmaker at the NFB. Commonly referred to as “The Gentleman Genius,” he is considered one of Canada’s most influential filmmakers. Low has won over five BAFTA awards, eight Cannes Film Festival awards, six Academy Award nominations, the Order of Canada, the Prix Albert-Tessier award, and a distinction from the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Low is sometimes described as a technological innovator in 3-D technology, large-format cinema, and multiple-screen projections. He was also a pioneer in documentary filmmaking, an advocate for science, a moralist, a humanist, and, perhaps most importantly, a socially engaged filmmaker.

Born and raised in Cardston, Alberta, and with a background rooted in the LDS(Church of Latter Day Saints), Low would live a very traditional life. His parents were ranchers, and the family lived in the last city, founded by wagon migrations from Utah, USA. Low would leave the traditional life for education at The Banff School of Fine Arts and the Calgary Institute of Technology, where he would study graphic design and animation at the schools. While in school, he submitted a student portfolio to the NFB in 1946 at a teacher's recommendation.  A week later, he was hired by Norman Mclaren. 

Mclaren would place Low into the hands of George Dunning. Dunning and Low would start a five-year-long mentorship before he went to work for Evelyn Lambart in another animation wing of the board.  In 1946, he collaborated with George Dunning on the work for Cadet Rousselle—the first film to use articulated color metal cut-out figures. Time and Terrian(1948) was another of the first animated contributions to nationwide classroom films.

In 1949, the NFB fully recognized Low as a filmmaker; in 1950, he was appointed Head of the Animation Unit, which he would serve for over 12 years. Low’s mind was perfect to run the animation division. Quoted once, “My Principal interest has always been the possibilities of the film – and its limits. Entertainment isn’t my forte. Social action is.”

Colin Low's next dive into animated worlds would be creating the award-winning animated The Romance of Transportation in Canada, 1952. The film begins with the canoe in the 16th century, giving way to larger boats to accommodate commerce and trade. Then, the film would flash forward to The late 18th century, showing the stagecoach's arrival. Then, there were the Industrial Revolution steam-powered engines, the early 20th century, and the internal combustion engine. The film ends with a UFO landing in a busy city, causing traffic chaos. 

Corral (1954) would be shot in the Alberta Prairies, opening with wide open spaces to emphasize the confrontation between the main character of the cowboy and the wild Mustang. Here, Low brings his camera into action, employing medium and close shots, hand-held shots, and low angles that capture the cowboy against the sky until the horse is tamed.  Low refused to stick to the classic notion of the West as a genre of wide and long shots. Instead, Low modulated his camera to take in the human element of man versus nature, a theme he would continue in many other documentaries.

Colin Low’s City of Gold (1957) would be considered his crowing achievement. Low and his fellow filmmakers at the NFB had just discovered a massive cache of over 20,000 negatives and photographs by studio and outdoor photographer Eric A. Hegg.  Inspired by them, the filmmakers wanted to recreate the gold fever that struck the territory in a documentary film. From here, Low invited Kroitor to work alongside  British mathematician Brian Salt to create a system whereby every image was re-photographed, allowing each shot to appear made by a hand-held film camera.

Everything was carefully calculated. First, Low and the team meticulously framed the best parts of each photograph. Then, they plotted movement from frame to frame within the shots so that the movements worked as transitions, developments, and changes of subject or location. The illusion that the world went on in all directions beyond the camera frame was always maintained while never showing the photograph's edges. The team also invented a “gadget that enabled animation-camera movement to be plotted live.”

The result shocked audiences and was successful in its evocation of the past, aided further by its colorful narration, written and voiced by the Yukon-born and -raised Pierre Berton. The City of Gold won the Canadian Film Award for Film of the Year and the Prix du Documentairy for Best Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a BAFTA and an Academy Award. The film’s unique style of recreating history via archival photographs was a key influence on Ken Burns, who said that when he first saw City of Gold, “A light bulb went off in me.”  From there, he would create The Ken Burns Filmmaking Effect, a type of panning and zooming effect from non-consecutive still images in film and video production.

Low would use his newly gained knowledge from The City of Gold to film the still imagery for the beginning of  City Out of Time (1959), with Venetian paintings replacing photographs and opening inside Ottawa’s National Gallery before flying to Venice. Once there, there are low intercuts between art, the city, and the human observers, primarily tourists. In just under 16 minutes, Low raises complex and abstract questions about distinguishing great art and evaluating art.

Colin Low and Roman Kroitor’s outstanding achievements together on In The Labyrinth for Expo 67 consumed his life starting in 1964. When work on the film commenced, Low was so committed to it that he turned down an offer to work with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 

2001 is one of the most impactful and genre-defining films in science fiction. Plot-wise, the entire film is divided into four sections, beginning with a wordless, twenty-minute prologue focusing on ape-like humans in a desert wilderness, a jump-cut spanning four million years, to twentieth-century Earth where humans have found a monolith on the moon, ending with the third act eighteen months later, in 2001 when a mission crewed by commanders David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) are sent to Jupiter, identified as the source of the monolith’s signal. 

2001: A Space Odyssey was inspired by a National Film Board film, Universe(1960), co-directed and created by Colin Low and Roman Kroitor. Often compared as a precursor to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series,  Universe followed astronomer Donald MacRae throughout a night observing at the David Dunlap Observatory, north of Toronto. 

The animation was so realistic that US astronauts trained to fly to space were required to view it. Clocking in at 27.43 minutes long, it uses mattes of images of space, miniatures, and footage from The University of Toronto’s Observatory. The film's opening soundtrack is virtually identical to the legendary thudding drum beats and camera angles from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The moon's surface featured in the movie is perhaps one of the most impressive miniatures ever created at the NFB.

During Stanley Kubrick's careful crafting of  2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick called upon Harry Lange, a NASA concept artist and designer who knew rocketry and had worked with Werner Von Braun.  While working alongside NASA and preparing for the shoot, Kubrick attempted to view every science fiction movie incorporating visual effects. Among the films that impressed him the most was Universe. Kubrick contacted Wally Gentleman, a collaborator on Universe and director of special photographic effects for the National Film Board of Canada, who from there contacted Colin Low and Sidney Goldsmith.

Kubrick, now in contact with co-director Colin Low, would inquire about animation camerawork and the procedures that helped create the realization of Universe. Low recommended British mathematician Brian Salt, with whom Low and Roman Kroitor had previously worked on the 1957 still-animation documentary City of Gold, to help achieve the slow-moving motions of the exterior unique shots. However, Kubrick couldn’t convince Low to collaborate on his space operas but successfully convinced Wally Gentleman to do so. 

Wally Gentleman was one of Canada’s most long-forgotten filmmakers. He was born in 1926 in Yiewsley, London, Borough of Hillingdon, England, UK. He was a cinematographer known for The Shape of Things to Come (1979), Iron Warrior (1987), and Change of Mind (1969). He died in 2001. 

“Kubrick had worn out a couple of prints of Universe trying to deduce how things were done,” remarked Gentleman in a sample from Cineflex Magazine. “Based on what he saw, he wanted to get all three of us involved in Universe to do the effects for his big film production. He was looking for the very best quality that he could get, and the way he wanted to do it was to get everything on original negative, which is something we had largely accomplished on Universe. But, at that point, we were deeply engrossed in the planning of Labyrinth for Canada’s Expo ‘67, and I was the only one willing to break free to join Kubrick in New York. Kubrick said he felt six months ought to be enough for the job, so I decided to take a leave of absence from the Film Board. I was engaged as the director of special effects for the entire movie, but my main purpose at the outset was to act as Kubrick’s general instructor in basic effects techniques. He had a commanding knowledge of still photography but lacked precise knowledge of special effects operation. He was the most able student I’ve ever taught because he could soak up information like a sponge.” Gentleman returned to England at the request of Stanley Kubrick to assist in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which would mark Gentleman’s exit from the Canadian film industry. 

As a senior supervisor, Wally Gentleman spent his initial weeks in England laying a solid foundation for the overall effects of the film. Gentleman said, “I tried to impress upon Kubrick the necessity of having our special effects equipment set up in a sterile environment. The optical and process work on the animation stand had to be in a sterile environment– otherwise, every speck of dirt would become an unwanted star. The models could stand a dirtier stage, but keeping everything clean was important. If you have dust floating in the air when flooding a set with mighty lights, you end up with what looks like bright stars drifting all over the place. But Kubrick couldn’t understand why dirt would play an enormous factor in assembling these images. His original plan was to set up the effects work in a giant aircraft hangar because he realized that the shooting would be very protracted, and he didn’t want to deal with the expense of having to shoot all of that time in the studio. So the idea was that we’d design the methodology for the effects, then go and lose ourselves in an aircraft hangar for a couple of years after principal photography. Fortunately for us, MGM was in a recession and was closing down the studio laboratory– a good, clean, air-conditioned space. Said to Stanl, '  ‘Look, this facility is being ripped out. Let’s move in there.’ I think he got a particular price concession, and we did everything in that old defunct lab.”

For 2001: A Space Oddessy Gentleman also experimented with high-grain beaded projection screens to test the possibility of front screen projection through a semi-surfaced mirror. Front projection methods were famous for combining foreground performances with pre-filmed background footage, and it was a popular method used in various Hollywood productions until the 1990s. The last major film to use the technique practically in Hollywood was the Sylvester Stallone action thriller Cliffhanger from 1993.

Throughout the production, the gentleman was plagued with countless inspirational and wild ideas from Kubrick. One, in particular, sprang from Kubrick’s determination to replicate space photography for the film's cinematography by using a single-source, high-key look by illuminating the models with a brilliant strobe light. “We knew that by using a point source at a long distance, we’d get tough black shadows,” said Gentleman, “which is what we wanted. Kubrick thought that the way to do it was with a photographer’s high-intensity strobe light, so we conducted a test with a six-foot model of the Discovery, which we mounted on something like the edge of a lathe bed, with a screw thread so we could inch it along incrementally on a worm gear. We would open the camera shutter in total darkness, flash the strobe to get our exposure, then close the shutter and advance to the next frame. Then, we’d move the model and repeat the whole operation. The problem was that we’d be sitting there in total darkness, and when this excellent sunlight flash came on, no matter what we did to block it out, it would burn the red of our eyelids right into our eyes. A half day of that, and we were practically blind.”

In the spring of 1967, Gentlemen would pack up and leave the production. His departure was due to a medical condition requiring surgery, his increasing frustration with Kubrick’s eccentricities as a filmmaker, and the oppressive work regime. “My entire career I had spent doing everything meticulously and precisely,” explained Gentleman, “but when I ran into Kubrick, I found a man who had an absolute obsession with the picky details of everything, and I wasn’t comfortable with that excess. After five or six years with the Film Board, I had grown into the thought of producing things in the most economical manner possible. In 2001, I didn’t see any economies being affected at all. The budget was open, and you could do whatever you wanted, virtually, and I found this to be a rather strange circumstance because so much money was being wasted.”

“The hours were terrible. Every day, we’d start at eight in the morning and work until eight or ten in the evening. Then, at two in the morning, there’d be a phone call: ‘Hey, Wally! I’ve got a great idea...’ That gets a bit dreary after a while. I enjoyed Kubrick; the man, very much– the experience with him was vital and interesting. But I learned that one doesn’t work with Kubrick– one only works for him– and I found that rather difficult. As a filmmaker, he was a little paranoid and certainly obsessive. He surrounded himself with really good people and dissipated their talents. Eventually, I got fed up with the autocratic methods being applied, often seemingly arbitrarily and at variance to the useful application of the associated talent. After about a year and three months, I finally reached the point where I’d had enough and decided it wasn’t worth it anymore. So I left.” After Gentleman’s departure, Douglas Trumbull took responsibility for the effects work. 

Another gift from the NFB to Stanley Kubrick was the voice of HAL 9000. The narrator of Universe was Douglas Rain, known best by his voice as The HAL 9000. Rain was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. After hearing the man upon viewing Universe, Kubrick contacted Rain to travel to California to record the iconic voice. Rain passed away from natural causes on November 11, 2018.

After pointing Stanley Kubrick In the right direction and working on his own personal projects in 1972, Colin Low switched to the NFB’s Studio C as an Executive Producer. He served in that role until 1976, when he became the Director of Regional Production. From there, He became one of the most important figures at the National Film Board and is accredited with creating hundreds of nationally impactful films. 

Low was an incredibly humble man who never let his ego grow over his work. Reflecting with The Globe and Mail on 1997 December 6th, Low would say: “But I didn’t make that many films when it comes down to it, he said thoughtfully over a coffee at La Brioche Lyonnaise, across the street from the film board’s Robatheque with a reporter. “Only about 50 all told, but I helped to make 200.”

Low was a filmmaker who believed that filmmaking and good filmmaking with a straightforward story should leave the viewer in a contemplative state or learn something from the experience. Low loathed the commercialization of film and television and detested the modern use of it for entertainment in cartoons and TV shows. As well as how it pandered to the youth, distracted them, and reduced creativity. “It amounts to a massive oversimplification of reality at an age when kids should be learning complex things. And there is a trend to simplification everywhere.” He would say. “Even at the NFB.” He saw this commercialized effort as a reason defunding was a standard issue for federal film institutions, which he also vocalized was a national threat.

During his lifelong stay with the NFB, Low produced 203 films, including 100 documentaries. One of the most famous was Standing Alone(1982), in which he documented the history of the Kainai Nation Tribe in Alberta.