Home > Theater 1 > Films > Original The main portion of the show began with a film that told the story of how fossil fuels were created and featured the largest animated motion picture ever created. The film took guests on a trip back to the dawn of life on Earth, and explained how sunlight gave rise to microscopic creatures that fed on tiny plants that captured and stored energy from the sun. The film then went on to explain how these creatures eventually died and formed a layer of organic matter on the ocean floor, which was compressed over millions of years and transformed into shale, and finally into oil and gas. From there, the film showed how this process took place on land as well. As prehistoric plants and trees captured the sun's energy, they too eventually decayed and were compressed into peat and finally into coal. At the conclusion of the film, a dramatic thunderstorm raged in a prehistoric marsh. As dinosaurs ran through the fierce storm, the narrator beckoned us to "experience a few moments of that dark and mysterious past." As the turntable rotated toward the Diorama, the film "wrapped off" the screen at the same rate as the turntable rotated, as through transporting us from the film into the "reality" of that "dark and myseterious past"--in the Primeval Diorama before us. The film was shown on three giant 70mm motion projection screens that together measured 157 feet wide and 32 feet high. A "multi-plane" animation camera was used for the first time in over twenty-five years to photograph the film, which lasted a mere four minutes and 18 seconds. The camera, which was pioneered by Walt Disney Feature Animation over 60 years ago, was used in ways never imagined. One challenge faced by the animation staff of 50 people was the size and scale in which they were working. Each individual animation cell (all of which were hand drawn and inked) measured over six feet in length, a far cry from the typical cell for a standard 35mm motion picture, which measures only around eleven inches in length. The film was directed by veteran Disney animator Jack Boyd. "The challenge in enlarging animation to this scale," said Boyd, "is to put enough action in every frame to keep the viewer entertained no matter where he [or she] looks on the screen and yet not have it appear too busy." Like all of the other large format motion pictures used throughout EPCOT Center at the time, the images were projected at 30 frames per second, as opposed to the standard 24 frames per second that eliminated any possible projection flutter. The effect was nothing short of breathtaking. The film, and indeed the entire presentation, including the subtle but extraordinarily elegant segue into the Diorama, remain among the most dramatic and moving that Disney has ever presented in a theme park.