Sudbury filmmaker a success on largest screen possible: David Lickley estimates his movies have made $100M.

• Author: Migneault, Jonathan
• Position: SUDBURY

David Lickley estimates his movies have made around $100 million over the course of his 20-year career as a filmmaker.

An impressive feat, considering his movies aren't typically screened in conventional movie theatres.

Instead, Lickley belongs to a small group of filmmakers who make large-format IMAX films, primarily destined for museums and science centres around the world.

Lickley's career has brought him to every continent, including Antarctica, where he filmed a large colony of penguins.

After he received a master's of biology from the University of Alberta. Science North hired Lickley as its director of large format films in 1984, the year the science centre opened.

While Science North did not build its IMAX theatre until 1994, Lickley got his start designing multimedia exhibits and films for the centre's Cavern auditorium.

In 1999 Lickely directed his first IMAX film, Gold Fever.

The movie profiled a gold prospector, the Yukon gold rush, and brought viewers to Ghana, where they were introduced to the king of the Ashanti kingdom, who dressed himself in gold from head to toe.

In the years that followed he directed a number of IMAX films including Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees. which explored the famous zoologists work with chimpanzees in Africa, and Mysteries of the Great Lakes, about the world's largest freshwater bodies.

In 2011 Lickley directed his most successful film to date, a documentary called Born to be Wild.

The co-production between Warner Bros. and IMAX documented the people who rescue orphaned elephants and orangutans in Africa.

The film opened in more than 200 theatres on April 8, 2011, and won a number of awards, including best film at the Giant Screen Cinema Awards and a Genesis award for outstanding feature documentary

The movie's success marked a turning point for Lickley's career. "It made me realize it was probably time for me to branch out a bit and give me some flexibility in terms of what projects I could take on." he said.

In 2012 he parted ways with Science North and started his own production company called Lickley Productions Inc.

Lickley works out of his Sudbury home where he has been able to take on a number of large, and small, film projects.

"I have a small office. I don't have very big overhead. I keep it simple," he said.

He manages some of the projects himself, while in other cases he works as a freelancer for hire with different production companies.

His latest IMAX film, and his first since he has...