A couple of local business owners and a film crew will soon shoot a movie in one of the least-explored regions on Earth. And while they’ll be halfway around the world on an island full of rainforest, they’ll be right at home. Not only have they researched their destination thoroughly and traveled there to set up the trip, they’ve been filming movies in remote locations for over 30 years.

The resulting IMAX film, "Island of a Thousand Voices — Mysteries of New Guinea," will be the first in a 12-movie series made possible by a recent $100 million investment. Mal and Kathy Wolfe, owners of Goleta company Lobo Productions, approached a group of European investors to fund one film. The investors liked the idea so much that they decided to fund a dozen.

Lobo Productions is located on Ward Drive, in the old Motel 6 corporate headquarters. Upon entering, guests meet a tank full of fish, the building’s "guard dog" — a boxer-sized mutt who follows visitors around the office and chomps a squeaking monkey chew toy— and an diving helmet prop from the 1954 Disney film "10,000 Leagues Under the Sea." From this headquarters, the company will produce the New Guinea film and the rest of the series, one of which will be distributed each year through 2015.

When filming starts in January, a film crew of eight Santa Barbara locals will be joined by two to four scientists and 10 to 15 local guides and assistants. "We’ll have a ton and a half of equipment," said Lobo producer/director Mal Wolfe.

Filming begins only after extensive scouting and planning, which, in turn, stem from extensive research into what audiences want to see. The film will take about 18 months to complete, and the company will begin work on the series’ next feature while "Island" is in post-production.

New Guinea is divided into two halves, Papua New Guinea and Pegunungan Maoke, which is part of Indonesia. It has the third-most rainforest in the world, and is home to a breathtaking array of \cultures — about one-third of Earth’s 3,000 languages are spoken on the island, said Vincent Purcell, vice president of production.

"It’s probably one of the last true wilderness regions," Purcell said. "There are a lot of places on the island that really haven’t been charted and explored."

Many of the tribes and ethnic groups’ lifestyles, they said, haven’t changed much in the last several centuries. It was only in the 1930s that three Australians, the Leahy brothers, discovered that the central part of the island was populated. The million or more residents of inner New Guinea had never seen white people; when the Leahys came, with their shotguns and strange clothes, the natives thought they were ghosts.

The Wolfes will make two trips there for an in-depth study of what to expect, before the shoot begins. The scouting already has been finished, as has the permitting process with the governments involved.

Lobo has been around for a decade. Wolfe — "lobo" means "wolf" in Spanish — had been doing large-format cinematography on a free-lance basis for 20 years.

Wolfe decided as a schoolchild in Pennsylvania, once he’d had a look at the book "Green Continent," that he would embark on an adventurous career.

"I just sort of made my mind up that I was going to pursue a life of traveling," he said, and photography seemed a way to do it.

He received a bachelor’s degree in 1962 from Brooks Institute of Photography, and got his master’s from Pepperdine. Then, he joined the Marines, where he "did a little bit of traveling courtesy of the U.S. government."

After the Marine Corps, he pursued large-format filming.

"I got a call from a fella, and he said, ‘I just saw your demo reel in New York, and I’d like to hire you to DP (act as director of photography for) an IMAX show,’ " Wolfe said.

That fella was IMAX co-founder Graham Ferguson. "I hung up the phone, and I said, ‘What the hell is IMAX?’ " Wolfe said.

He was involved with "Oceans," the first underwater IMAX film, back when the only two IMAX theaters were in Toronto and San Diego. He also had a hand in "Ring of Fire," "Darwin and the Galapagos" and many other IMAX features.

By 1993, the thrice-weekly commute to Los Angeles was becoming too much to bear. "We decided to bite the bullet and form our own company, and go it on our own," Wolfe said. Since then, Lobo has been involved with more than 17 IMAX films.

Over the years, the Wolfes have worked in "something like 57 countries worldwide." They enjoyed living in Africa and Tibet particularly, Wolfe said. One period in the Middle East led to a job photographing Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah’s visit to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.

"The Secret Service was a little confused," said Kathy Wolfe. The U.S. camera crew was ethnically diverse, while the Saudi crew was made up of white Lobo employees.

When the company went to the European investors for money for one film, the liked it so much they decided to fund a dozen.

Though Lobo doesn’t have any local clients — before the recent investment, their funding came primarily from museums and the National Science Foundation — they hire locally, said Kathy Wolfe.

Lobo staff run the business, from administration to operating hundreds of thousands of dollars of editing equipment, in the building. The space is so well-equipped, said Kathy Wolfe, that other than film processing, the company can do much of its work in-house.

"We’re pretty well contained right here, except for film and processing," she said.

Photo Caption: Lobo Productions director-producer Mal Wolfe with some footage of tribesmen in New Guinea. The island will be the subject of Lobo’s next IMAX movie. Photo by Sky Bonillo