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Cinerama
Cinerama is a widescreen process that originally projected images simultaneously from three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen, subtending 146° of arc. The trademarked process was marketed by the Cinerama corporation. It was the first of a number of novel processes introduced during the 1950s, when the movie industry was reacting to competition from television. Cinerama was presented to the public as a theatrical event, with reserved seating and printed programs, and audience members often dressed in their best attire for the evening. The Cinerama projection screen, rather than being a continuous surface like most screens, is made of hundreds of individual vertical strips of standard perforated screen material, each about  inch (~22 mm) wide, with each strip angled to face the audience, so as to prevent light scattered from one end of the deeply curved screen from reflecting across the screen and washing out the image on the opposite end. ...
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Cinerama Historians John Harvey And Willem Bouwmeester 1987
Cinerama is a widescreen process that originally projected images simultaneously from three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen, subtending 146° of arc. The trademarked process was marketed by the Cinerama corporation. It was the first of a number of novel processes introduced during the 1950s, when the movie industry was reacting to competition from television. Cinerama was presented to the public as a theatrical event, with reserved seating and printed programs, and audience members often dressed in their best attire for the evening. The Cinerama projection screen, rather than being a continuous surface like most screens, is made of hundreds of individual vertical strips of standard perforated screen material, each about  inch (~22 mm) wide, with each strip angled to face the audience, so as to prevent light scattered from one end of the deeply curved screen from reflecting across the screen and washing out the image on the opposite end ...
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This Is Cinerama
''This Is Cinerama'' is a 1952 American documentary film directed by Mike Todd, Michael Todd, Jr., Walter A. Thompson and Fred Rickey and starring Lowell Thomas. It is designed to introduce the widescreen process Cinerama, which broadens the aspect ratio so that the viewer's peripheral vision is involved. ''This Is Cinerama'' premiered on September 30, 1952, at the Broadway Theatre in New York City. Synopsis The film begins in black and white and the standard Academy ratio as travel writer and newscaster Lowell Thomas appears to discuss the evolution of film entertainment, from the earliest cave paintings designed to suggest movement to the introduction of color and sound. At the conclusion of the 12-minute lecture, Thomas speaks the words "This is Cinerama" and the screen expands into the full Cinerama 2.65:1 aspect ratio and full color as a series of vignettes, narrated by Thomas, begins. The film includes point-of-view scenes of the Atom Smasher roller coaster at Rockaw ...
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Ultra Panavision 70
Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65 were, from 1957 to 1966, the marketing brands that identified motion pictures photographed with Panavision's anamorphic movie camera lenses on 65 mm film. Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65 were shot at 24 frames per second (fps) using anamorphic camera lenses. Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65's anamorphic lenses compressed the image 1.25 times, yielding an extremely wide aspect ratio of 2.76:1 (when a 70 mm projection print was used). Ultra Panavision saw much less use than its sibling, the more popular Super Panavision 70, and was only used on ten films from 1957 to 1966. However, nearly fifty years later, Robert Richardson famously resurrected Ultra Panavision 70 after the lens test he came to do at the Panavision headquarters for the upcoming project with Quentin Tarantino, where he discovered that the lenses and equipment were still intact. Tarantino was fascinated by this and was able to refurbish the lenses for use in his nex ...
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70mm
70 mm film (or 65 mm film) is a wide high-resolution film gauge for motion picture photography, with a negative area nearly 3.5 times as large as the standard 35 mm motion picture film format. As used in cameras, the film is wide. For projection, the original 65 mm film is printed on film. The additional 5 mm contains the four magnetic strips, holding six tracks of stereophonic sound. Although later 70 mm prints use digital sound encoding (specifically the DTS format), the vast majority of existing and surviving 70 mm prints pre-date this technology. Each frame is five perforations tall, with an aspect ratio of 2.2:1. However, the use of anamorphic Ultra Panavision 70 lenses squeezes the image into an ultra-wide 2.76:1 aspect ratio. To this day, Ultra Panavision 70 produces the widest picture size in the history of filmmaking; surpassed only by Polyvision, which was only used for 1927's Napoleon. With regard to exhibition, 70 mm ...
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Widescreen
Widescreen images are displayed within a set of aspect ratios (relationship of image width to height) used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than the standard 1.37:1 Academy aspect ratio provided by 35 mm film. For television, the original screen ratio for broadcasts was in fullscreen 4:3 (1.33:1). Largely between the 1990s and early 2000s, at varying paces in different nations, 16:9 (1.78:1) widescreen TV displays came into increasingly common use. They are typically used in conjunction with high-definition television (HDTV) receivers, or Standard-Definition (SD) DVD players and other digital television sources. With computer displays, aspect ratios wider than 4:3 are also referred to as widescreen. Widescreen computer displays were previously made in a 16:10 aspect ratio (e.g. 1680 × 1050), but now are usually 16:9 (e.g. 1920 × 1080). Film History Widescreen was ...
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CinemaScope
CinemaScope is an anamorphic lens series used, from 1953 to 1967, and less often later, for shooting widescreen films that, crucially, could be screened in theatres using existing equipment, albeit with a lens adapter. Its creation in 1953 by Spyros P. Skouras, the president of 20th Century Fox, marked the beginning of the modern anamorphic format in both principal 2.55:1, almost twice as wide as the previously common Academy format's 1.37:1 ratio. Although the technology behind the CinemaScope lens system was made obsolete by later developments, primarily advanced by Panavision, CinemaScope's anamorphic format has continued to this day. In film-industry jargon, the shortened form, 'Scope, is still widely used by both filmmakers and projectionists, although today it generally refers to any 2.35:1, 2.39:1, 2.40:1, or 2.55:1 presentation or, sometimes, the use of anamorphic lensing or projection in general. Bausch & Lomb won a 1954 Oscar for its development of the CinemaScope ...
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Mike Todd
Michael Todd (born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen; June 22, 1909 – March 22, 1958) was an American theater and film producer, best known for his 1956 production of '' Around the World in 80 Days'', which won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Actress Elizabeth Taylor was his third wife, and Todd was the third husband of Taylor's seven husbands, and is the only one whom Taylor did not divorce - Todd died in a private plane accident a year after their marriage. He was the driving force behind the development of the eponymous Todd-AO widescreen film format. Early life Todd was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Chaim Goldbogen (an Orthodox rabbi), and Sophia Hellerman, both of whom were Polish Jewish immigrants. He was one of nine children in a poor family, the youngest son, and his siblings nicknamed him "Tod" (pronounced "Toat" in German) to mimic his difficulty pronouncing the word "coat." It was from this that his name was derived. The family later moved to Chicago, arriving on ...
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Fred Waller
Frederic Waller (1886 – May 18, 1954) was an American inventor and film pioneer. Career Waller is most known for his contributions to film special effects while working at Paramount Pictures, for his creation of the Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer, and for inventing Cinerama, the immersive experience of a curved film screen that extends to the viewer's peripheral vision for which he received an Academy Award. Waller, a snow skiing and boating enthusiast, is also credited with obtaining the first patent for a water ski in 1925. He produced and directed 200 one-reel shorts for Paramount, including '' Cab Calloway's Hi-De-Ho'' and Duke Ellington's '' Symphony in Black''. He patented several pieces of photographic equipment, including a camera that could take a 360-degree still photo. As the special projects director for the 1939 New York World's Fair, he collaborated on the fair centerpiece attraction called the Perisphere, the Eastman Kodak Hall of Color, and he developed the T ...
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Lowell Thomas
Lowell Jackson Thomas (April 6, 1892 – August 29, 1981) was an American writer, actor, broadcaster, and traveler, best remembered for publicising T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). He was also involved in promoting the Cinerama widescreen system. In 1954, he led a group of New York City-based investors to buy majority control of Hudson Valley Broadcasting, which, in 1957, became Capital Cities Television Corporation. Early life Thomas was born in Woodington, Ohio, to Harry and Harriet ( née Wagoner) Thomas. His father was a doctor, his mother a teacher. In 1900, the family moved to the mining town of Victor, Colorado. Thomas worked there as a gold miner, a cook, and a reporter on the newspaper. In 1911, Thomas graduated from Victor High School where one of his teachers was Mabel Barbee Lee. and began work for the ''Chicago Journal'', writing for it until 1914. Thomas also was on the faculty of Chicago-Kent College of Law (now part of Illinois Institute of Techn ...
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Radiocentro CMQ Building
The Radiocentro CMQ Building complex is a former radio and television production facility and office building at the intersection of Calle L and La Rampa in El Vedado, Cuba. It was modeled after Raymond Hood's 1933 Rockefeller Center in New York City. With 1,650 seats, the theater first opened on December 23, 1947, under the name Teatro Warner Radiocentro, it was owned by brothers Goar and Abel Mestre. Today the building serves as the headquarters of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT). Construction For the construction of this building, the Havana building authorities granted a permit in 1947 amending the ordinances that were then in effect in El Vedado prohibiting the construction of buildings of more than three storeys. This statute was modified six years later to expand the construction of up to four floors because many planners and owners claimed the need to authorize them to build taller buildings in the area. The building was set back from the property li ...
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Anamorphic Lens
Anamorphic format is the cinematography technique of shooting a widescreen picture on standard 35 mm film or other visual recording media with a non-widescreen native aspect ratio. It also refers to the projection format in which a distorted image is "stretched" by an anamorphic projection lens to recreate the original aspect ratio on the viewing screen (not to be confused with anamorphic widescreen, a different video encoding concept that uses similar principles but different means). The word '' anamorphic'' and its derivatives stem from the Greek ''anamorphoun'' ("to transform"), compound of ''morphé'' ("form, shape") with the prefix ''aná'' ("back, against"). In the late 1990s and 2000s, anamorphic lost popularity in comparison to "flat" (or "spherical") formats such as Super 35 with the advent of digital intermediates; however, in the years since digital cinema cameras and projectors have become commonplace, anamorphic has experienced a considerable resurgence of popula ...
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Polyvision
Polyvision was the name given by the French film critic Émile Vuillermoz to a specialized widescreen film format devised exclusively for the filming and projection of Abel Gance's 1927 film '' Napoleon''. Polyvision involved the simultaneous projection of three reels of silent film arrayed in a horizontal row, making for a total aspect ratio of 4:1 (1.33×3:1). Polyvision's extremely wide aspect ratio was the widest aspect ratio yet seen, even though it is technically just three images side by side. In 1955, the Walt Disney Company developed Circle-Vision 360° for use in Disneyland theme parks which used nine 4:3 35 mm projectors to show an image that completely surrounds the viewer. This configuration is considered to be a similar precursor to Cinerama, which would debut a quarter of a century later; however, it is unlikely that Polyvision was a direct inspiration for later widescreen techniques, as the triptych sequence of ''Napoleon'' was cut from the film by its di ...
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