Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1953)

13 Cinerama, Inc. / SAW CINERAMA A movie maker and engineer reports for ACL on Hollywood's latest headache JOHN R. HEFELE, ACL WHEN I arose from my seat, after a recent performance of This Is Cinerama in New York's Broadway Theatre, I felt that the most admiring adjectives of the first-night critics had been understatements. "Sensational!" "Breath-taking!" "Revolutionary!" — These, and other impassioned accolades, were all true. In fact, perhaps the only untruth is my own opening statement— about "rising from my seat." For the plain truth is that about half the time I wasn't even on the seat. No, sir! I was in the front seat of a diving Coney Island roller coaster, clutching the hand rails in desperation as the skeleton structures reeled by me, the wheels bumped and roared — and the audience (myself included) screamed with excitement. I was hovering over Niagara Falls in a helicopter, with the mighty thunder of the waters welling up around me. I was in Venice for a water festival. And as the gondola glided smoothly under the low bridges I found myself ducking to avoid a cracked head. But, by now, you probably are familiar with the succession of sequences which has made Cinerama the present-day sensation of the movie making world. There is a choral recital for which the stereophonic sound is so realistic that people turn in their seats, expecting to see the twin columns of choristers marching down the aisles. There are bullfights in Spain, a gathering of the bag-piped clans in Scotland, and a visit to Florida's Cypress Gardens, where daredevil racing drivers plunge almost into your lap with their snarling, bucking outboards. And there is, finally, a moving and infinitely beautiful tour by air over many of America's outstanding landmarks. Seen for the first time in the multi-dimensional perspectives of Cinerama, these familiar subjects take on new and impressive stature. Being a movie maker (and, it says here, an engineer), I was naturally curious about this latest development in stereo-cinematography. Therefore, I remained at the theatre after the show to check objectively on the impressions I had absorbed both visually and emotionally. I already knew, of course, that Cinerama does not rely on polarizing glasses to create the illusion of stereoscopic reality. Instead, it recreates as accurately as is possible what the eye actually sees and the ear actually hears, by reproducing on film virtually the entire range of human vision and hearing. To do this it employs a special camera with three lenses of 27mm. focal length, their angles of view 48 degrees apart and each recording on its own magazine of 35mm. film a third of the scene being shot. These three films are then simultaneously projected on a huge concave screen by three projectors in balcony booths — with the one on the left filling the right third of the screen, the one on the right filling the left side and the one in the center directed straight ahead. The result CINERAMA CYCLE begins with tri-filmed, tri-lensed camera and six microphones, ends at cycloramic screen and eight speakers. is an image not only three times as wide as that of an ordinary motion picture but, because Cinerama uses a six rather than four-sprocket frame, half again as high. Altogether, the Cinerama screen is 64 feet across the top of the arc, 23 feet high and has an area almost six times that of a standard movie screen. It is not size alone, however, or even the curvature of the screen that provides the illusion of reality. The new and unique accomplishment is that Cinerama duplicates in a theatre the "peripheral vision" of the human eye. The average range of man's vision is 165 degrees horizontally and 60 degrees vertically; Cinerama closely approximates this visual field by reproducing an image 146 by 55 degrees in coverage. The effect on the viewer, confronted and all but surrounded by the same optical frame of reference as in real life, is not only the immediate illusion of three-dimensional vision but the sense of actually taking part in the action on the screen. But again this enlarged and encompassing area of moving imagery does not comprise all of Cinerama's amazing magic. For, as well as being wrapped in action, the audience is also bathed in sound. During production six separate omni-directional microphones are used, strategically spotted around the scene of action and each recording on its own track the sounds picked up in its particular area. In the theatre, these sound tracks, imprinted side-by-side oh a single strip of magneticallycoated 35mm. film, are separately amplified by eight speakers placed behind the screen, at the sides of the auditorium, and even at the rear of the theatre. Consequently, sound comes to the audience from the direction of its original source: when a plane zooms across the screen the noise of its en [Continued on page 22]