Smilebox cinerama1/25/2024 ![]() Until then you can find more information on Cinerama, including some great stills of film frames, at the highly recommended Widescreen Museum. It will be interesting to see how effective this new stab at old technology is, but it sounds like an admirable attempt to present How the West Was Won as it was originally meant to be seen. This seems to be a simple distortion of the image designed to create the illusion of Cinerama, as in this frame from the SmileBox website: 3-Strip Cinerama (3x35mm), Ultra Panavision 70 Blu-ray DigiBook: 2K restoration (OCN), cropped SmileBox and 2.89:1 widescreen versions, 5.1 Dolby TrueHD, Audio commentary (David Strohmaier, John Sittig, Jon Burlingame, Loren James, Rudy Behlmer) Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Cinerama Productions 2. This will include a special feature known as ‘SmileBox’ which will recreate the curved Cinerama image. How the West Was Won, starring John Wayne, Henry Fonda and James Stewart (above), will be released in a new Blu-Ray edition in August. In Flicker Alley’s releases of This is Cinerama (1952) and Windjammer, the films are presented in a Smilebox format approximating the viewing experience of the films during their original road shows, on the requisite, massive curved screens. Well now you can view this fascinating process from the comfort of your own home. Later films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) were filmed in Super Panavision 70 and then presented in a 70mm Cinerama image rather than the 3-Strip image of the original films. ![]() Outside of exotic travelogues intended to exploit the Cinerama experience (much like many IMAX films today), only two fiction films were shot in genuine Cinerama: How the West Was Won (1962) and The Wonderful World of The Brothers Grimm (1962). This would provide the viewers with a spectacular, almost three dimensional, image. Uniquely the image was projected onto large screens that was literally curved. It actually required five projectionists operating three projectors to view these films. The involvement that the image the Smilebox format delivers would be the same thing you would see if you are standing in the lobby of a Cinerama theatre looking through a door from the lobby at the back of the auditorium. By using three adjacent 35mm cameras, an extremely wide image could be created. SmileBox greatly improves this and gives you what you would see in the theater. Straight lines become very curved on the sides. Hence, if you flatten it out, optical distortion becomes very pronounced. Let me simply note that 1) the Cinerama process was the third most important event in the history of motion pictures (the first being 'The Birth of a Nation' and the second being the introduction of sound), and 2) the film itself is a monumental summary of the western including most of its icons, its styles, and its themes. I saw some demos of Todd AO films in smilebox and they looked cool. Although Cinemascope was the first of the new widescreen processes to hit the screen with the high-profile The Robe in 1953, a rival technology called Cinerama was premiered in September 1952. The Cinerama camera is very wide and captures a broad and curved panorama. It had the capability to capture 120 degrees of an arc which was close to Cinerama.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |