![]() ![]() The triple cameras were heavy, bulky, and noisy. It was truly an exceptional experience.īut the system had flaws, and there were many. I was lucky enough to see Cinerama at the Casino Cinerama Theatre in London in the fifties. To jump from a flickering 4 x 3 mostly black and white picture to something so massively impressive is astonishing. There must be admiration for Waller, Mike Todd, and the developers of Cinerama to have had the vision and daring to move cinema technology forward so much in one giant leap. It was created to demonstrate the potential of Cinerama and of course contained the now-famous roller coaster ride that at the time felt so real it induced motion sickness in some people in the audience. Cinerama And The Evolution Of CinemascopeĬinerama was first commercially demonstrated on Broadway on September 30, 1952. It was the ‘big gun’ that would drag people back to the cinema. The film was also shot and projected at 26 frames per second instead of the standard 24 and was accompanied by seven-track magnetic audio running on a separate 35mm filmstrip. This meant an image of unparalleled definition because of the enormous combined frame size. Not only was it wide but taller too, instead of the standard four perf pulldown each camera frame was six perforations high. This produced an extremely wide 146-degree field of view, close to what we see with our eyes. It used a system of three interlocked projectors beaming onto a wide deeply curved screen. Have we captured your curiosity? Here’s our video on the origins, history, and legacy of CinemaScope:įred Waller, Lowell Thomas, and Mike Todd along with Merian Cooper got together and used a system that Waller had created much earlier but never fully developed, they called it Cinerama. The answer was size, colour and spectacle. Studios looked to what they could offer that television couldn’t. Studios had been experimenting with wide-screen processes for movies since the 1920s but had run into problems with cost, image quality, and theaters’ reluctance to change projection equipment.įox’s CinemaScope was different - it used anamorphic optics to compress a wide image onto standard 35mm film, and could easily be adapted to existing theaters.īy the mid-1950s, most major studios had adopted CinemaScope or similar processes, although some continued to use the standard Academy ratio for a time. ![]() Many classic films were shot in CinemaScope, including The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), South Pacific (1958), Ben-Hur (1959), and How the West Was Won (1962).ĬinemaScope was introduced by 20th Century Fox in 1953 as a way of differentiating itself from other studios and boosting attendance at theaters. Television screens at the time were tiny, some less than twelve inches (30cm) across and of course in the beginning black and white.īut the small picture in a big box in the corner caused an unrelenting decline in cinema audiences.ĬinemaScope is a widescreen process that was used in the 1950s and early 1960s, before being supplanted by others such as Panavision. Interestingly television ultimately copied the same 4 x 3 aspect ratio, a picture shape that people were accustomed to in cinemas. Television – was at first a novelty, but very quickly became a threat to the cinema. People got used to the idea of being entertained at home from this new box in the corner. In the late forties and early fifties, television began to take hold, and studios and cinemas began to see their audience numbers decline. There was however something around the corner that would provide that impetus. Shot in black and white on 65mm film it was John Wayne’s first lead role, but at the time there was no real impetus for wider formats, so the 4 x 3 box-shaped image remained. Since its early beginnings, the shape of the screen (its aspect ratio) was almost square at around 4 x 3, (4 units wide and 3 units high) and it stayed that way for more than seventy years.Īlthough several early tests had been conducted on wider formats, ‘The Big Trail’ released in 1930 was possibly the most notable. To really talk about CinemaScope and its impact on cinema we need to understand a little of what cinema was like pre-1950s. ![]()
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