Four directors representing the IMAX cognoscenti discuss the thrill and the agony of shooting in IMAX 3D.

– At the nfb since 1960, Tony Ianzelo codirected Transitions with Colin Low and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1976 for the documentary Blackwood. Ianzelo also codirected Urgence, the first imax film to use multitrack sync-sound recording.

– A 53-year veteran of the National Film Board, director/producer Colin Low recently won the Prix Albert-Tessier, the Quebec government award for career achievement in cinema, and has directed, produced and collaborated on some 200 productions.

Low has been instrumental in the development of giant-screen film formats and active on projects such as Expo ’67’s Labyrinth, the first imax single-projector film Tiger Child, and Atmos, the first 70mm dome-screen Omnimax production. He also codirected Transitions and the part-animation Universe.

With 38 years nfb experience and extensive expertise in nonconventional cinematography, Ernie McNabb collaborated with Colin Low on the 1980 70mm/15-perf Omnimax (now IMAX Dome) film Atmos.

McNabb helped pioneer the prototype stereoscopic imax camera rig used for Transitions, and was behind much of the equipment design for the first-large screen film shot in 48 fps.

– Stephen Low directed The Last Buffalo, Titanica and Flight of the Aquanaut, and produced and directed Across the Sea of Time and Mark Twain’s America in imax 3D for Columbia and Sony. In 1986, he founded the Stephen Low Company and pushed development of giant-screen format equipment.

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As IMAX giant-screen technology continues on its path of global expansionism, imax 3D is leading the assault as well as continuing to provide a huge challenge for imax filmmakers. The first color imax 3D film showed in 1986 in Vancouver. There are now 30 imax 3D theaters worldwide, with 51 more in development.

Tony Ianzelo, Colin Low, Ernie McNabb and Stephen Low have each been responsible for pushing the imax format creatively and technically, with numerous titles and much industry recognition among them.

Recently, McNabb, Ianzelo and Colin Low, now retired from the National Film Board, together with six other large-screen format enthusiasts, have formed a company called Kinomax to provide gyro-stabilizing equipment for imax films. The company will also launch a second generation helicopter stabilizing platform for imax, likely this spring, and will offer equipment as well as film services to producers.

Like some kind of elite spy organization, the nine partners in the new company represent a wide and varied range of expertise. In addition to the nfb alums, participants include engineer Nox Leavitt, production manager Chris Medawar, 3D specialist Per Inge Shei, computer and electronic expert Victor Plichota, key grip and equipment fabricator Robert Grenier and helicopter pilot David Tommasini.

The group is also developing several large-screen format films, handling everything from direction to distribution, and is now working on financing for the projects. ‘We’re all in one way or another engrossed by [the large-screen] format. We all have one common purpose,’ says McNabb, Kinomax president. ‘That is to make this format easier to use and to make good films.’

Here, Ianzelo moderates a roundtable discussion on imax 3D with McNabb, Colin Low and Stephen Low.

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Tony: What frustrates you most, Stephen, about shooting in imax 3D?

Stephen: Well, it has to be the most difficult, complex system used of anything ever developed, short of the nine-screen Disney thing. It’s really hard to say. It’s kind of like an accumulation of things ganging up on you – none of which are overwhelming – but when you take them all together, they are.

One is the size and the weight of the camera, and depth of field issues with those big lenses, the absence of being able to use convenient things like zoom lenses, the inability to hand-hold at any time, which you can now do quite nicely in 2D imax with a 50-pound camera. We’re talking about trying to alleviate that now by having bigger mags, maybe not 2,700 feet, but maybe 2,000 foot mags. So, it’s all of those things ganging up on you and the inertia those things create.

We were shooting Mark Twain, simple little shots in his Hartford House in Connecticut, and we needed a nice shot of an empty rocking chair on the porch to dissolve in a still shot of [Twain] sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, but we were working two stories up in this building. Every time we would come down the stairs to get a shot, the sun would go down, for instance, or go out.

And then we’d schlep all the stuff back up, and then the sun would come out, and we’d go all the way down. And in three days, a shot that is so simple – so simple normally you could send you assistant cameraman out to get a spare 35mm in the trunk and do it himself – is a nightmare.

The need to have more beautiful light is much more acute in imax probably than it is in a smaller screen. So, to shoot a muddy shot – you don’t even conceive of that. The difference between a beautifully lit rocking chair and an ugly, flat, hot-lit or overcast shot is the name of the game.

Tony: What about dealing with performers in 3D?

Stephen: I don’t have much experience with that, I did Across the Sea of Time, and I found it was probably easier to do than anything I’d ever done. My philosophy in that film was, if you take the well-known fact that if you have to project or exaggerate in theater, in film, you reduce that radically. My feeling was to reduce it even more in 3D imax, to almost nothing – much to the chagrin of the studio who wanted everything exaggerated. But I would say that may be a rule of thumb.

Colin: I think that’s true. I think if the person is at the end of your arm’s length, you really see every muscle in the face, and you don’t want projection. It’s an intimate performance in a sense. I think there aren’t a lot of actors who can do that. I think you have to be very careful in terms of selecting your performers.

Tony: We talked about things that frustrated us in the imax 3D format. Stephen, what do you love about it?

Stephen: Oh, it’s the greatest tool ever. I guess the fundamental frustration against that is that on the one hand you’ve got the best tool ever built in the history of imagination of any kind – and that’s not exaggeration either. But against that is the extraordinary difficulty of using it properly. And even worse than that is being compared to the very, very, very easy-to-use formats.

And it’s frustrating. Films, 35mm, with all the refinements of it – zero load time, 10-minute mags, fantastic depth of field, high-speed lenses, zoom lenses, hand-held equipment, and on and on and on. It’s a hundred years of film development there. Film is so cheap that on Hollywood sets I’ve seen directors get the camera up to speed and then give the actors their instructions.

Anyway, it’s frustrating. For example, in the case of Mark Twain, we were working with a us$6-million budget, which is about enough to pay for the stock and a fairly modest crew. On Across the Sea of Time, we had a little more, we had around us$7 million. But people are comparing you to television, and it’s a factor of 20 or 30 times more difficult to do in 3D imax.

On the other hand, you sit in the theater and say, ‘Wow, those are great images.’ But everything else being equal, it’s never going to be as good as 35mm… It’ll have to have a lot of development.

Ernie: And a lot of years.

Tony: There is a lot going on. We’re just now into synch sound with imax.

Stephen: Not really, Tony. I don’t know any synched sound. Documentaries have to be synched.

Ernie: We did synch on Urgence and we did synch on First Emperor.

Stephen: Yeah, and Titanic we did synch.

Ernie: But as you said, it’s nothing like picking up a Panavision 35mm or a b.l. camera.

Stephen: That’s another reason why drama is in some ways more doable than documentary, because there is no synch and actors are much more skillful at looping than a non-actor. I think the future of it all is in drama, really. Modestly engineered for quite a few years, but…

Tony: How far away do you think the feature-length film is in imax 3D?

Stephen: Well, Across the Sea of Time is 53 minutes; the early Disney movies were also. The animated films were only 70 or 80 minutes, so 20 minutes longer than Across the Sea of Time. That’s plenty for 3D. Just over an hour I think would qualify for feature length – you don’t have to be two hours. We’re right on the edge of that, but the problem is economics. We’re expected to keep raising the bar and make better films with, in fact, shrinking budgets, everything else being equal.

Colin: But there are now 30 3D theaters capable of showing…

Stephen: But no films.

Colin: But you probably need 100 theaters to really give you the kind of budget resources.

Ernie: What’s happened is that the prices paid to producers are not increasing along with the costs of making the films.

Stephen: Yeah, there’s continuous pressures from the theaters to reduce the costs and to run weaker and weaker films because they just don’t want to pay for them. And that’s a huge problem. So is that going to happen in 3D? I think it’s happening right now. People are more desperate for 3D, so they’re willing to pay a little more, although the costs are almost double.

Colin: There’s much more public interest in 3D.

Stephen: I think once people see that you can really pull something off… It’s just like having a sound movie. After going to a sound movie, who the hell wants to go to a silent one? Or a color movie, who wants to go to a black and white? Once you’ve seen 3D…

Ernie: At the istc (International Space Theatre Consortium), all the theater owners who had 3D theaters were just desperate for the product, they’re really looking for films.

Tony: With more and more 3D theaters being built, there’s going to be one hell of a crunch in the near future, isn’t there?

Stephen: We’re on the edge of it right now – in the next few months or in the next year or so – it’s already happened. I mean, there isn’t enough 3D films being made. Somehow that has to be addressed by the whole community and I don’t think it’s just imax that can do that.

Ernie: There’s a bit of a bottleneck right now.

Tony: Colin, what were some of the pioneering benchmarks that you and Ernie brought to the imax screen?

Colin: I think that what we felt at the very beginning was that the big-screen imax format was wonderful, but if you’re watching it with two eyes that work, it’s too flat when you come into close-ups – not if your camera is moving strongly – if you’ve got lots of parallax movement in the shot, then it looks three dimensional.

But in some situations, when you’ve got close-ups of people, they look like they’ve been steam-rollered into the screen, and suspension of disbelief is difficult. So it seemed to us in the beginning that with 3D, you returned a kind of intimacy to the big screen that the 35mm has, simply because it’s a window.

But 3D is certainly more than a window; the objects come tight through the window and sit on your lap. But it has to be controlled in a way that you really, truly can suspend disbelief.

My problem at the moment is that there hasn’t been enough experimental work done with the relationship between the inter-ocular of the cameras, the distance apart of the cameras, and where you want the drama of the action to take place. I would like to see more work done with narrower inter-oculars in close-ups.

Stephen: Well, it’s hard to do that with an imax Solido camera, which is…

Colin: Which is just one fixed inter-ocular of three inches, and it tends to miniaturize the close-up. I’d like to be able to use the first system we used, which is the mirror system. But Solido is excellent in terms of case of use.

Stephen: My shoulder was shot, actually my collarbone, from carrying the Solido camera.

Ernie: Humping that bar?

Stephen: Well, it’s four of us on the bars and if somebody slips…It’s 300 pounds.

Ernie: The old camera system is 2,000 pounds with all the gear, but at least you could break it down into small components.

Colin: I’m not talking about the weight now. I’m talking about what I want to see on the screen. And I believe you have to have an adjustable inter-ocular, and that is the distance between the lenses.

In the case of the old system, the mirror system, we had everything from zero inter-ocular right up through quarter-inch, half-inch, one inch, two-and-a-quarter inches – which is normal – to five inches.

Ernie: We could actually only go to about four-and-a-half inches.

Colin: Yes, you’re right. We could go to four-and-a-half, and that gives you a really nice working range on the inter-ocular, and the Solido camera doesn’t have it. So, in one sense, the films that I would be interested in doing in 3D, I would use the old system. But that in relation to what is rentable and what is… It’s hard to put the old system back together, but I miss the range of inter-ocular. And I see it in the films…

I thought Stephen’s film Across the Sea of Time was good. I didn’t mind the kid slightly smaller than his real-life size because it made him vulnerable in a sense – a small kid… it has a magic realism quality… But in certain films, for instance The Wings of Courage, I just find… the people at the table were too small.

Stephen: Well, it’s also a function of lenses because they’re not all equal.

Ernie: It depends on your distance to your subject.

Stephen: But it’s the 40 that gave us the problem. The 60’s okay with miniaturization.

Colin: The 60’s a longer lens, but the longer you get, the more cardboarding you get on the screen.

Ernie: You’re back farther, trying to bring things up to you. The longer lens helps…

Stephen: But the 40 is a good close-up lens anyway. A reasonable lens.

Ernie: I prefer the 50.

Colin: Fifty is my favorite lens. One of the problems with the imax 3D is that you don’t have a chance to do as much experimentation as you need in order to develop the whole system, not just to develop a film. You might have the film that’s ideal for the equipment that’s available, but you go to another film and you’re missing equipment and you’re also missing expertise in terms of how things look.

Tony: What did you learn from the test that you and Ernie shot in imax 3D at 48 frames a second?

Colin: When we said we were going to do a 48-frames 3D test everybody at imax looked at us as if we were totally mad. In 48 3D you learn that you eliminate strobing, and strobing can exist not just in high-speed car shots, but in fast action with a gesture of the hand. And strobing is more noticeable in 3D than in 2D imax.

imax has for years wanted to eliminate the strobing. The large screen gives you strobing because there is just so much distance for an object to move across the screen. At 48 3D, the strobing is diminished. 48 3D is not viable right now the way it is because you double your costs and it’s outrageous. The second thing is everything becomes exponential – the lenses, the loss of a stop, the doubling of your noise level, the doubling of your stock weights.

Stephen: And you really have to use 2,700-foot loads, but they’re brutal.

Tony: And what about the amount of power that we needed for that one sequence?

Colin: The lighting was incredible. You’re quite literally doubling your lighting costs. We poured the lights on there and you fry; you really cook the actors.

Stephen: I don’t think there’s any point in doing 48 frames per second 3D when you can’t afford 24 3D.

Colin: This group has never believed that it was possible to go commercially into 48. We did a test, but all it told us is that we believed it`s economic insanity.

Stephen: On Mark Twain, I ran my camera to try to shoot the fireworks. Every time I tried to do 40 frames with that 3D Solido camera, the film would break.

Ernie: We had no trouble at all doing 48 frames with the Solido on Wings of Courage a number of times.

Stephen: Well, it’s the luck of the draw. It depends on temperature and moisture.

Colin: Did you get good fireworks?

Stephen: Yes, the fireworks are great, but…

Colin: They still strobed?

Stephen: Well, we were trying to do explosions and things. They’re okay, but it’s just when the film breaks – every time we try it, something goes wrong.

Colin: With a Solido camera?

Stephen: We had a different Solido camera.

Ernie: You’ve got number two.

Stephen: Yes, but we didn’t have any problems at normal speed.

Colin: At one point working on Momentum, which is just 2D at 48 frames a second, Ernie got very good at making that camera work under incredible conditions – 40 below zero at 48 frames per second.

Stephen: I like the idea of doing 48, but it’s just the economics, period.

Ernie: I think the economics are okay for a World’s Fair.

Stephen: Depends on the year.

Ernie: Well, it also depends on where your fair is. The next one is in Germany.

Stephen: But, keep in mind, if you’ve got six or seven or eight million to do a film…

Ernie: You’re eating up a lot of money in film.

Stephen: You’re now taking whatever opportunity you had to make a good movie, and you’re increasing your behind-the-camera as opposed to your in-front-of-the-camera costs. You can’t do anything, except buy your film.

Tony: One last point. Do we need faster stock?

Ernie: We’ve got 500 – 50 now.

Stephen: I’d love to have 2000 – 50!