That 24Hz sound? It's loud, it's abrasive, it's super comforting.

July 19, 2023 2:56 PM

I wish I had ever had a job that brought me as much joy as the man in this clip. 11 mile long 'Oppenheimer' film reel arrives in Grand Rapids [3m10s, ABC13] John Foley is an example of where occupation meets vocation. If you're curious about the actual process, here's OPPENHEIMER 70MM IMAX film print assembly at Science Museum, London. [14m] from bored_tech which details the technical steps of receiving and assembling one of thirty prints of this movie in this format in the world. I found this truly fascinating.
posted by hippybear (25 comments total)

I remember when Cineplex crushed the projectionist's union in Ontario.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 3:05 PM on July 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

His love of the format is so genuine and wholesome.
posted by misterbee at 3:24 PM on July 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

TO THE MANUALS!
posted by mykescipark at 3:30 PM on July 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Nice to see he is skeptical of digital projection here - I know comparing to 70mm IMAX format is not exactly fair to most theaters, but I went to a digitally projected IMAX Dune showing and it was disappointing: like watching through a screen door. Film may be a pain in the ass but it looks good as hell and right now digital options at their best are still a ways off when you're talking about large scale projection.

Sadly, doesn't look like we're getting the 70mm treatment... yet. But Cinerama is back in action here in Seattle or will be soon, so we'll get some traveling film showings yet!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:03 PM on July 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Unfortunately, IMAX format is a horizontal film format while I believe Cinerama is a vertical format, so you won't find an IMAX projection at the Seattle Cinerama at all.

I saw Pina at the Cinerama in 3D, as intended, and it was a transformative cinema experience for me. As for my companion who had no idea what the fuck he was going in to see.
posted by hippybear at 4:06 PM on July 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Fun to see cutting and splicing is almost the same as i did 60+ years ago as a kid with 16 mm. That crisp 'snick' as the file gets cut brought it all back.
posted by anadem at 4:31 PM on July 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

The second link reminds me of learning to overlap-splice 16mm educational films in Jr. High.

I was stupidly assuming all movies were recorded digitally nowadays and wondering what good it did to put a movie on 70mm film.

Still confused, I searched on YouTube and found, "Every IMAX Camera Christopher Nolan DESTROYED", which also contains a decent IMAX explainer.

Anadem!
posted by mmrtnt at 4:48 PM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Watching this fellow check in IMAX reels brings back so much nostalgia.

I used to run a 35mm cinema back in uni. We managed to get ahold of a couple projectors from a Maryland prison that was being shut down, which would have just been thrown away. What a massive waste of old 1960s equipment that otherwise was in tiptop shape, that that would have been! We renovated the theatre sound system, as well as screens.

We bought lenses for projecting films in various aspect ratios, good for old 1:1.33 and indie 1:1.65 films as well as doing cheap second-run shows for the other college kids on Friday and Saturday nights, as well as exclusive first-runs thanks to one of our film club members who was able to finagle shipments from movie studios, in exchange for test screening data from the kids.

We had all the gear to check in 35mm reels, shipped to us in their steel cases. Older films especially had problems with tears in the leader segments, the bits we'd spool into the takeup reel in the projector. Those took a lot of abuse from all other other projection houses. We'd check in the reels before projection, running them through the splicer and taping them up as needed.

Sometimes we'd nick the odd frame from a rarer film that came through the booth. We had a set of reels of This is Spinal Tap that Embassy Pictures lost and never asked back for, probably because that studio traded hands several times in the mid-1980s and all the paperwork was lost in the shuffle. Almost everything from Spinal Tap was fun to pull a frame from.

A bit of fun trivia about Get Shorty. Projectors use aperture plates in front of the lenses to ensure a film is shown in the director's desired aspect ratio. But if you take that aperture plate off, you get to see a bit more of the film than the director maybe intended.

In Get Shorty there are scenes where you'll get to see boom mikes that were kept in-shot, but were outside of the aspect window and so would otherwise never be seen by the viewing audience.

To this day I still wonder if director Barry Sonnenfeld, making a film about making films, was putting an in-joke that would only be visible to projectionists. I can't recall other films being as blatant about keeping the process in-shot.

Fun post. If I didn't have bills to pay, and if people still watched movies, I'd love to go back to the projection booth one day. Fewer memories bring me more laughs than hopping down from the booth and chatting up someone I had a crush on, than having the end of the reel happen because I got all chatty for twenty minutes or so and forgot to go switch the projectors over to the next 20 minute reel. Or a frame would get caught in the projector and melt for everyone's enjoyment. College kids would laugh at that. Now we demand refunds or just watch stuff on the comfort of a tablet screen. Oh well.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:43 PM on July 19, 2023 [17 favorites]

The bank of 9 or 12 4k laser projectors that could make a near-IMAX resolution experience would take up an enormous amount of space but it would actually work and Christie could likely hook you up if you had the wheelbarrow of benjamins to make it happen.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:07 PM on July 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also it would be in theory possible to build a 1.5mm pitch LED video wall the size of an IMAX screen but I cannot imagine the power draw required to make it run; it would probably have to be water cooled to be quiet enough for cinematic viewing. What a challenge to make though, what a coup to build if asked.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:11 PM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

This came across the twitters recently regarding the big IMAX print:

"So apparently IMAX theaters ran off of palm pilots for the quick turn reel unit. And nowadays, rather than having it run off a microcontroller or PC or raspberry pi or iPad, they just run a palm OS emulator?"

My hypothesis is that the company that made this machine is long gone, along with the source code, and it's easier to just emulate the finished app than try to rewrite it.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:18 PM on July 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

A bit of fun trivia about Get Shorty. Projectors use aperture plates in front of the lenses to ensure a film is shown in the director's desired aspect ratio. But if you take that aperture plate off, you get to see a bit more of the film than the director maybe intended.

This is more common than you think. There's a whole raft of 4:3 VHS movie transfers that were made from the non-apertured, supposedly widescreen prints of movies. I can't right now find the article I read about this, ages ago, perhaps lost to time. But yeah, things like boom mikes or people on the floor feeding in a special effect that would be cropped out were not unknown in video rentals.

I know Get Shorty is considerably newer than much of that era, but Sonnenfeld likely did put it in there on purpose.

Either that or his budget didn't allow for anamorphic filming and all the extra planning that requires.
posted by hippybear at 8:09 PM on July 19, 2023

San Jose's Tech Museum has a 70MM film IMAX theater. You could watch the huge film being spooled/unspooled behind a big window when waiting in line.

Unfortunately, for the next week, they are showing Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning at this theater, which I suppose might be fun to watch on a real IMAX screen.

But I'd prefer to see Oppenheimer at this theater. I hope they switch over at some point. Nolan's Interstellar was just mind blowing on this huge screen.

(mediareport, in a comment to a previous Metafilter post, mentioned how these two movies have been battling to get access to these theaters).
posted by eye of newt at 8:17 PM on July 19, 2023

I remember going to the drive in theater to watch Vegas Vacation and constantly seeing boom mikes in the shots and wondering just how much budget they've had to cut in the Vacation series to let this come out.
posted by newper at 8:18 PM on July 19, 2023

What happens to the film when the run is over? Do they have to disassemble it into all those short film segments to ship it back?
posted by jasper411 at 8:21 PM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I want to be friends with that projectionist. I did the job in the 2000s, for a longer period of my life than was wise really, because it just felt so much like my groove, you know? It was a very hard gig to leave behind - weirdly so, given how little it paid.

Good to see somebody's still out there keeping the sprockets oiled.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 9:40 PM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

> San Jose's Tech Museum has a 70MM film IMAX theater

List of the 30 theaters in the US showing Oppenheimer in 15/70. I'm seeing it at the Metreon in San Francisco. Weird choices- no Chicago, Providence instead of Boston.

> if you take that aperture plate off, you get to see a bit more of the film than the director maybe intended.

There's a format, Super35, popular in the DVD era, that was supposed to fix the problem that some people wanted letterboxing & some thought their TVs were broken when they saw those weird black bars. The top of the frame line is approximately the same so boom mics are kept out of shot, but you'll see more at the bottom on the 4:3 version and a little bit more on the sides in the widescreen. I rented Ronin & it came as a "flipper" disc with each side having an aspect ratio. When they're planning the job sitting around a table, you can see De Niro's legs only in the 4:3 version. It's a poor use of frame area: 4 perforations, but only 3 are used for the widescreen version. Anamorphic lenses let you get widescreen with all 4 perfs, though to get Cinemascope, it's a big squeeze which can cause artifacts, requiring more work for the Directory of Photography to shoot around.

Oh, and speaking of horizontally run formats, it can be done with 35mm also: VistaVision never caught on for distribution, but Lucas was able to buy a bunch of used cameras & use them for special effects shots where you might want to optical print big blow ups later. The 8 perf frame captured a lot more detail.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 10:11 PM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

You want to see a really strange wide-screen technology, check out ScreenX which offers 270° of viewing by projecting onto three of the movie theater walls (front and sides).

There are a few ScreenX theaters in the US (and a few in South Korea and some others scattered around).

I saw a Star Trek movie at a ScreenX theater many years ago to check it out, and, at least how it was presented in this movie, it seemed more of a gimmick. I think they just added some CGI to fill in the two sides to give you something to look at. I don't think any filmmaker is going to spend much effort using three cameras to film when there are only a tiny handful of theaters in which people will notice.
posted by eye of newt at 10:51 PM on July 19, 2023

Lord, I miss the warm fuzzy bit at the end of local news. Good stuff.
posted by Ghidorah at 11:13 PM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

What happens to the film when the run is over? Do they have to disassemble it into all those short film segments to ship it back?

I have the same question.
posted by bendy at 12:02 AM on July 20, 2023

check out ScreenX which offers 270° of viewing by projecting onto three of the movie theater walls (front and sides)

Cinerama is a very old format that used three projectors on a huge curved screen. I saw How The West Was Won in actual Cinerama once.
posted by hippybear at 6:43 AM on July 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

What happens to the film when the run is over? Do they have to disassemble it into all those short film segments to ship it back?

That's how it worked when I was doing it (very part-time) in the AV crew in college. Get the film in canisters full of 20 minute reels, splice them together into 40-60 minute segments to spool up to load on to our two projectors (you'd do a switchover once or twice mid-film, depending on length), and then when we'd done all the showing we were gonna do someone would reverse the process, finding and undoing the splices and returning it all to the original 20 minute reels, put 'em back in the cans, donezo.

Professional handling of 70mm reels for commercial projection presumably has a lot of differences in the details to college kids running beat-up 35mm prints on ancient hardware, but splicing is splicing. Same thing goes for reel-to-reel audio tape splicing in recording studios, though even fewer people are actually doing that these days and it's got its own set of complications.

My college actually did have 70mm-capable projectors, and we screened a couple things on 70 while I was there, but that was basically a "you kids get the fuck out of here, the adults are splicing and projecting this one" situation, which I was fine with because I wanted to actually watch the movie AND I didn't want to be responsible for fucking up a 70mm print.
posted by cortex at 7:34 AM on July 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Even if you don't have an IMAX (film) projection happening near you, you can see Oppenheimer in several film formats, including 70mm (still big and rare!) and 35mm (still awesome though a bit less rare). If you think film, in any format from IMAX down to Super 8, is cool, go see screenings on film!

Movies like Oppenheimer help make Kodak Vision3 films available to still photographers (like me!) and motion film amateurs/underfunded filmmakers via short ends (leftover film scraps), Cinestill and similar companies, and by keeping Kodak's film factory around.
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 8:23 AM on July 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

you can see Oppenheimer in several film formats, including 70mm (still big and rare!)

I've got two theaters very near to me, down the block from each other: one is showing digital IMAX, but the other has 70mm (non-IMAX). I still don't think this is for me, necessarily, but if I do decide to go, maybe I'll check out that 70mm projection. Neat.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:21 AM on July 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

John ran the IMAX at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry when were in college together in the 90s. It sounded like he was brought back into the IMAX world after a long absence, since so few people have worked with it. He's always spoken about the genre as evangelically as he did here. I remember him talking about how physically demanding it is to do it right as a projectionist.

I wonder if the locations were limited by theaters that have the full dome screen? It sounds like Oppenheimer was shot in Imax 65 mm, and it's scheduled to be the only movie shot in that large format film being released this year. But I don't think that's the same as full Omnimax, which is for the domed theaters (found mostly in museums) with the fisheye lens.
posted by answergrape at 12:46 PM on August 3, 2023