By Marion Rae in Canberra

Share a virtual helicopter with fair dinkum Hollywood royalty as the secrets of ancient landscapes are conquered by high-tech drones in Australia’s vast, rugged northwest.

“It gets under your skin. It’s one of the last truly great wildernesses left on Earth,” Luke Hemsworth, older brother to Liam and Chris, tells fellow explorers on a virtual flight into the Kimberley region.

Isolation has helped to preserve the remote part of Western Australia as a biodiversity hotspot and keeper of deep-time stories.

It is home to some of the world’s biggest tides, rock formations that date back two billion years, and the world’s oldest rock art galleries that have layers of images where artists have returned several thousand years after the first painters.

Hemsworth says the area has always had an “inexplicable pull” for him, so when he finished high school in Melbourne he flew to the remote northwest region of Australia to work on a pearl farm and explore.

He was also an obvious choice for the latest ground-breaking virtual reality (VR) documentary from award-winning Australian filmmaker Briege Whitehead.

“There really is nowhere else like it on the planet,” Hemsworth says, as narrator of The Great Kimberley Wilderness by White Spark Pictures.

Whitehead says it took four years to create the 35-minute film, the first of a three-film deal with the National Museum of Australia, the Western Australian Museum, Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum and ScreenWest.

“There’s a lot of innovative technology that’s going into it … for the night-time lapses in particular,” she said.

A scene where the Milky Way perfectly aligns within Cathedral Gorge, which only happens for three nights of the year, required custom-built equipment they developed with tech giant Canon and local firm Camera Electronic.

Otherwise, the cameras used for 360-degree filming look like giant soccer balls, with eight lenses around them to create the sense of immersion.

“It is essentially eight cameras in one, to achieve shots like that,” Whitehead explained.

Nor was there a drone set-up available off the shelf that could carry a 6.5kg, 360-degree camera so they customised that with internationally renowned XM2, which also worked with environmentalist Bob Brown on his recent film The Giants.

White Spark Pictures says it is the first in the world to produce high-resolution video that is 360-degree and 3D, with drone shots that are then stabilised using their own technology.

“We shoot everything between 8K and 12K, so as VR headsets get better and better, it’s already future-proofed,” Whitehead said.

“We do all our sound mixing at Warner Bros in LA, and this was the first film that we’ve done Dolby Atmos theatrical VR sound mix – it’s a first in the world for this medium, which is also why it sounds so amazing.”

Working with more than 11 indigenous communities, Whitehead said creating the sense of presence required a “very fine balance” to be struck in what stories they wanted to tell – to simultaneously avert future foot traffic and welcome people to explore in the right way.

The audience can journey to the three-tiered waterfalls in Carr-Boyd Ranges, filmed on Miriuwung Country, and to Oomari (King George Falls), filmed on Balanggarra Country, where a tourist could not go for cultural reasons.

Aerial views of the pindan cliffs coastline at Walmadany (James Price Point), filmed on Jabirr Jabirr Country, take virtual explorers to the stunning headland north of Broome that was once a proposed location for a gas terminal.

White Spark Pictures’ head of operations Benn Ellard said the one thing they wanted people to take away from the film was a sense of belonging.

“VR as a medium is a powerful tool for empathy … by building a connection to country and to have people care for country as if it was their own,” he said.

The doco has debuted in Perth and opened on Boxing Day at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.