The wilds of California are not so much a place as they are a state of mind - a free-spirited, nature-infused way of life that is viscerally captured in ADVENTURES IN WILD CALIFORNIA, the latest IMAX® theatre adventure from MacGillivray Freeman Films and K2 Communications. Through a myriad of exciting and touching personal stories, the film reveals how the wild lifestyles of California culture are influenced by the untouched California wilderness that surrounds them.

ADVENTURES IN WILD CALIFORNIA is a virtual expedition that sends audiences careening down an icy, steep mountain face with snowboarders; twirling on thermals above the clouds with skysurfers; swimming through the oceans with otters and their surrogate human mother; excavating the very heart of a thirty-story tall Giant Sequoia with botanists and emerging from under the spray of one of California's biggest, surfable waves. The heart-pounding imagery recreates an experience of California's furthest edges few will ever know first-hand.

Created by the same team that brought EVEREST to IMAX theatres, ADVENTURES IN WILD CALIFORNIA is at once a celebration of California's wild nature and a call to preserve and protect its wild places for future generations of adventurers.

Space cam is a highly sophisticated, stabilized camera platform that is permanently mounted to the front of this helicopter. It was used to film all the aerial scenes in the IMAX film "Wild California". Seen here in Lone Pine California in front of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Detail of the camera pod and mount can be seen here along with space cam technician Alex Waite. The head set and microphone connected to the mount are used to communicate with the pilot.

Wild California was filmed in numerous places but one of my favorites was the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. Here Cinematographer Brad Ohlund composes a shot similar to the one in the next photo.

Even though the main cables are three feet in diameter, they appear to shrink into tiny threads while connecting the two towers. To give a bit of scale, the opposite shore is about a mile away, the road is about 400 feet below and the water is about 300 feet below that.