The651.com

We are a week into Omnifest at the Science Museum, and we’ve yet to see any of the 5 films showing on everyone’s favorite giant, motion-sickness-inducing screen. If you aren’t familiar with Omnifest, its a six-week Omnitheater film festival where you can catch any one of 5 movies each day. For members the first movie each day is free, and if you want to catch a few more while you are there its 15% off each ticket.

I wanted to get our oldest, Dominic, all psyched up to check out some of these films, so I decided I would show him the online trailers for all 5 and let him decide which ones seemed the most interesting. Certainly it’s hard to judge a movie made for the mega-screen from a tiny little online trailer, but as you will see in the video below, certain themes emerged.

Dominic Previews “Omnifest” for the651.com from 651 Family on Vimeo.

“Africa’s Elephant Kingdom”: For some reason Dominic found it hilarious that they referred to an elephant community as a “kingdom”. He also noticed there were a lot of scenes of both fighting and babies, and wondered if at some point we’d see fighting baby elephants.

“Into The Deep”: Dominic is obsessed with sea creatures so he pretty much spent the entire trailer shouting out the names of the fish and animals he saw. I figured this one was going to be a winner.

“Van Gogh – Brush with Genius”: He recognized some of Van Gogh’s famous paintings, but that wasn’t enough to keep him from deeming this one “boring”. No real shock there. I thought it looked cool though.

“The Greatest Places”: He perked up for this one, especially the scenes that involved giant icebergs. So I thought maybe he was impressed. But when I said “woah” during a majestic scene, his reaction was “what do you mean woah?”. Hrmmm.

“Ski To The Max”: No shock that he was digging this one. Basically its a bunch of footage of the craziest skiing stuff you’ve ever seen.

So – probably obvious, but – stuff involving snow, animals and action definitely wins with the 8-year-old set over stuff involving close-up analysis of paint strokes and slow-moving nature scenery. Regardless, the scale of the Omnitheater can make even mundane subjects seem huge and engrossing.

Omnifest runs through March 11th.