A look at how IMAX movies are made

As film makers continually aim to produce the highest quality and most life-like movie experience, creating an IMAX movie for theaters is becoming more common with major motion pictures. Releasing blockbuster movies in IMAX theaters is a rapidly growing trend with more of these mammoth screens being built around the world every year. The term IMAX itself stands for “maximum image” and named appropriately so as you'll find out.

The first IMAX movie was demonstrated in Japan in 1970 with the first official IMAX theater opening in 1971 in Toronto, Canada. Since then, the popularity of watching these larger-than-life films has continued to grow. As of September 2010, 470 IMAX theaters (about 348 commercial and 122 institutional) have been built in 45 countries around the world . The largest cinema screen in the world is an IMAX theater located in Sydney, Australia, measuring approximately eight stories high . For Americans, if you're ever in Wichita, Kansas, you can view a film there on the world's largest digital IMAX screen. A standard IMAX screen is still impressive, however, with an average screen size of 72ft. x 52. 8ft. (approximately 6 to 6.5 stories high). These screens are designed to take up a viewer's entire peripheral vision, putting someone as close to the action as possible.

The film used in IMAX cameras are twice as big compared to standard 35mm negatives found in the average movie camera. A 35mm negative measures 21.95 x 18.6mm, but a 15/70mm IMAX film negative will measure 70 x 48.5mm. Due to a higher image quality, the film moving through an IMAX camera is much faster at around 24 frames per second during filming. The camera itself is typically only capable of holding film reels that will last around three minutes. In order to project these extra large film negatives onto an IMAX screen, the film projector itself is massively bigger than standard sized, weighing in at two tons and being almost six feet tall.

Using an IMAX camera to film a documentary or movie is no easy feat. There are several types of these cameras in use today, but all of them are much larger compared to the standard movie camera. Whereas a normal 35 mm camera may weigh approximately 40 lbs., an IMAX camera can weigh well over 200 lbs. and typically many times larger. Unsurprisingly, the size and weight of one of these state-of-the-art cameras makes maneuverability a key problem when filming motion pictures.

At the moment, the most common use for IMAX cameras is making documentaries. For anyone that has been to one of these impressive films, you may have noticed that the average running time is around 40-50 minutes. Taking into account the cost of 70mm IMAX film negatives and the use of its cameras, this shortened time length makes sense. However, it seems likely that the minutes will continue to extend as technology advancements and budget costs become more obtainable. It can be noted that not all films displayed in an IMAX theater use IMAX cameras. Some movies are simply filmed with a standard 35mm camera and then converted to IMAX format later.

However, plenty of documentaries have been filmed using the latest IMAX capabilities. These state-of-the-art cameras have been to the depths of the Pacific Ocean in Deep Sea 3D (2006), atop the Swiss Alps in The Alps (2007), to outer space in Hubble 3D (2010), through the Grand Canyon in Grand Canyon: River at Risk (2008), as well as many other remarkable locations. One of the latest IMAX features is Born to Be Wild (2011) which takes place in Africa and is narrated by Morgan Freeman.

A trend that movie viewers are seeing more and more every year is the release of major motion pictures in IMAX theaters. Some film makers are pushing movie making boundaries by using IMAX cameras for selected film scenes in order to obtain extremely high quality images. As mentioned before, due to the size of these cameras, the difficult task of shooting sequences becomes an obstacle that directors and camera crews are well aware of. These film makers have become creative at constructing special rigs and stands in order to support the weight of these cameras.

Blockbuster movies such as The Dark Knight, Inception, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen have all used IMAX cameras to shoot some of their scenes. The Dark Knight, for instance, had approximately 20-30 minutes of footage that was made with IMAX technology. The bank robbery scene as well as a chase scene in Batman's Tumbler were among those shot with IMAX cameras. As noted with IMAX documentaries, not all major motion pictures released in IMAX cinemas used extensive IMAX technology, but the movie watching experience in front of these six story high screens is unlike anything else. (You can always stay up-to-date with which latest documentaries and full feature length films will be shown in IMAX by checking local movie listings for that particular theater.)

So the next time you're at an IMAX theater, you can have a better understanding and appreciation for all the technology, strength, and film making motivation that was used to bring you a maximum, larger-than-life movie experience.