"The Wizard of Oz" as you've never seen it before

You've likely been off to see The Wizard ofOz, but never like this, on a screen larger than 4 football fields, sound from 167,000 speakers and in 16k, the highest quality resolution ever for a film. It's beautiful, isn't it?

It's an immersive experience, putting the audience inside the movie, including the twister that carries Dorothy from the heartland to Munchkinland. I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

No, Dorothy, you're in Vegas now, re-imagined at Sphere, the enormous orb-shaped venue just off The Strip. How many people you got, more or less, working on this? Oh, probably 2,000. It'll be a long credits list afterwards.

Jim Dolan, best known as the owner of the New York Knicks and Rangers, is Sphere's creator and its CEO. You've never seen Judy Garland like this before. You've never seen Ray Bulger dance like this. And the connection between the audience and the performance is what I'm really looking for. Does it hurt you? Oh, no. I just keep picking it up and putting it back in again.

Our standard on this was not to modify the film at all, but to try and bring you into the film as if you were in the studio when it was shot. That's what you're going to see.

When Dolan and his collaborator, producer Jane Rosenthal, decided to bring a classic film to Sphere, they agreed on, according to the Library of Congress, the most-watched movie of all time. Everybody loves it, no matter how old you are, or how young it makes you feel. And it was also a movie that pushed itself in terms of its technology and its vision of what it could do for the industry. The obstacle for us wasn't that we were going to take something that we loved, that was a classic, legendary film that we both loved, it was, How are you going to put it on a screen this wide? How are you going to do that when you have a small, traditional frame? Right. It was in a box.

It was in a box.

And it was also a box office failure when released in 1939. In 1956, its fortunes changed when CBS aired it on TV. Generations have now watched it at least once a year. But turning that into this requires state of the art technology, including artificial intelligence. We wanted to make sure we captured the original details.

Ravi Rajamani is Managing Director of AI for Google Cloud. We built a custom built an AI model that understood how Judy Garland looks, and then was able to generate the Super resolution images of that.

So a grainy, close up of Dorothy becomes richly detailed. And then through a process called out painting, though it seems like magic, we see the rest of the Scarecrow, the yellow brick road, and the mountains of Oz. This is the original movie and you can see the camera panning back and forth. And then when we get to Uncle Henry's performance, you can see how we create all the variations here.

Ben Grossman is the visual effects supervisor. In the original, nobody saw him walk over. Nobody saw him walk over.

But on a screen this wide, Dorothy's Uncle Henry needed to stay in the picture. So I created a brand new performance out of actor Charley Grapewin.

So you can see that Uncle Henry's walking over and rejoining the original cinematography. Those are performances that were prompted based on the context of the script, and what the director has done, and what their performances would be. Wake me up ruthlessly and I'll grant your request.

It's easy to be dazzled by all this advanced technology, but there's an old fashioned, low-tech component to this Wizard ofOz. AI is not your business. We work in the physical world here. Yeah, we are here to ensure that everybody gets a great experience of feeling like they're in The Wizard ofOz, and that includes sight, touch, sound and smell.

Those are 4D effects. Glen Derry is the Oscar-winning technical wizard tasked with having audiences feel Dorothy and Toto's journey to Oz. How do you make the tornado? How do you make the audience feel the tornado? Yeah, well, it starts with a base layer, right? So we do it in layers. It's kind of like an orchestration. We have different wind effects we're going to bring in. We're going to bring in different fog effects. We're going to bring in wind and leaves and different kinds of particulate in the atmosphere. And you kind of layer it layer by layer. So we have these big devices that are behind us called the [INAUDIBLE]. They're kind of our floor base layer of wind. Now you can definitely feel the seats in the wind. Yeah, can definitely feel the wind now. Yeah. Then we add to that giant fans and it all kind of layers and layers and layers, and eventually you get this lovely vortex of wind. And then we're going to continue to build upon that until we land in Oz. We really want the audience to feel like they're there. We want them to feel the magic of being in a place that they cannot be. And I want them to be there with all their friends and family.

Speaking of family-- So it always took her back to being a child and having that as her first starring role alone, and to know that everybody took care of her.

Lorna Luft, Judy Garland's daughter, says her mom would approve. I think that she would really think how wonderful that this is happening. And I'm sure that she would love the audience reaction. That's funny. Wasn't he pointing the other way? Of course, people do go both ways. Why, you did say something, didn't you?

This Wizard of Ozopens August 28. Jim Dolan and Jane Rosenthal are clicking their heels, hoping the reaction meets the effort. What do you want people to take away from this when they see The Wizard of Ozat the Sphere? There's no place like home. There's no actress like Judy Garland and that performance.

A performance Lorna Luft hopes exposes new fans to her mother's singular talent. And that's what I think is just remarkable, is that they've been able to take this classic, unbelievable, joyous movie that means so much to everyone and put it in a new format that a whole new generation and generations of people will be able to see. (SINGING) --on the face of the Earth or the sky