IMAX & Aspect Ratio | A Problem...

Dune Part 2 has been shot in IMAX. That's where you get the full immersive experience. It's true, Dune Part 2 is the type of movie that's meant to be viewed on the big screen. And not just any big screen, the massive boxy IMAX screen. But with this release comes the inevitable discourse on IMAX's expanding ratios. And IMAX's marketing is quite clever, releasing videos like this to illustrate just how much more you're getting. When you see the film in one of their proprietary theaters. You can even buy the sweatshirt to show just how much you love their big square screens. But this discussion creates a focus where a film's aspect ratio somehow becomes the most important feature of a film. It creates a fixation on cropping. On which scenes are expanded and which scenes aren't. Where any crop is likened to Pan and Scan, which it most definitely is not. Just listen to VFX supervisor Paul Lambert. Yeah, there was one shot in particular. That's the one where Paul is at the bottom of frame and the worm is rising up in frame. There was just no way that we could get the same feeling in the IMAX and the 2-3-9. Because basically, Dune wanted the frame to be full of worm. So those two shots are actually two different shot numbers. So yeah, I was encouraging people to see both versions because they are different. Critiques of cropping miss perhaps the biggest part of the equation. The filmmaker's intent. But to really understand this, we need to go back. The year was 1968 and it marked the release of Stanley Kubrick's landmark science fiction epic, 2001 A Space Odyssey. This film almost single-handedly set the bar for the genre that still stands today. Shot in glorious Super Piano Vision 70mm, the imagery was nothing short of stunning. It would be nearly nine years until its broadcast premiere in 1977. And what a sight to behold. Except it wasn't. The entire film had been panned and scanned from its original widescreen aspect ratio. In the final scene of the film, we're left with this. The director of quality control for HBO justified the process by noting, there's always a center. And well, apparently this was it. Starchild was completely cropped from the frame, which was rectified with a pan entirely devoid of artistic intent. In a 4x3 frame, Kubrick was robbed of his narrative agency. In a 1982 issue of Time Magazine, he commented that the process was a very unsatisfactory technique. One that destroyed the compositional elements. And another filmmaker's movie didn't fare much better. Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind received the same pan and scan treatment. And in that same Times article, the author noted, in one of the most magical moments of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, scientists stare in unashamed wonder at the first appearance of a little space creature. In the 1981 television version, they just stared. The space creature was cut out of the picture. For his part, Spielberg remarked, it was a disaster. And the issue at hand was exactly the inverse of what's faced today. How to fit a widescreen film on a small square screen. And filmmakers largely had two options. Each a sort of compromise in their own way. This motion picture was photographed in the grandeur of CinemaScope. And option one, you could keep your original aspect ratio by letterboxing your film. But don't confuse this with the widescreen letterbox presentations we have today. This widescreen came at the expense of precious resolution. NTSC broadcasts were limited to 525 scan lines of transmission. On VHS, that resolving power amounts to about 240 horizontal lines of resolution. Add black bars to the top and bottom for your 239 film, and you've just about halved that resolution. Sure, you have the entire width of the film, but at what cost? Option two was pan and scan. The far more common choice, but wherein you lost half your film. The problem? About 99% of the video audience will see the film pan and scanned. Which half of the picture, the left or the right, don't you want the audience to see? This was exactly the question posed by James Cameron in ASC Magazine's coverage for his 1997 hit, Titanic. And he was steadily honing a different style of framing. Well, sort of. You see, 35mm film framing has gone through some changes since its humble beginnings. And competition from TV in the 1950s saw the emergence of two widescreen standards within that frame. Flat, where an Academy aperture is matted to a 185 widescreen. And scope, where the image is squeezed onto the print and unsqueezed during projection for a 239 to 1 ratio. But Cameron had begun shooting in Super 35, a sort of revival of silent aperture, which matched neither projection standard. However, what the format did allow was the possibility of extracting an area for a scope 239 theatrical release, while simultaneously reserving some height in the frame for the inevitable video transfer. And Titanic marked James Cameron's fourth film captured in the format. His question in ASC Magazine was purely rhetorical. Titanic had its grand scope release, where audiences could experience the film in all its big screen glory. And when it came time for the home release, he wasn't forced to choose which half of the film he didn't want audiences to see. The extra height of the negative allowed him to open the top and bottom of the frame so that he wasn't forced to lose so much of the sides. But what's more interesting is what this allowed him to do for the film's 3D re-release in 2012. He opened the frame yet again. In this instance, expanding from 239 to 178. And Cameron felt this extension was essential to aiding in the immersion inherent in the 3D experience, where the boundaries of the frame seemingly disappear. Because he shot in Super 35, he was able to once again go back and remaster the film with this expanded ratio. In all, we get three different shapes to the screen, each carefully accounting for the different viewing experiences inherent within the frame. And another filmmaker was taking note of Cameron's process. I had read an interview with James Cameron years before where he had talked about whether you could make a film on IMAX and how that would work in terms of what he'd figured out, Cameron being the technical genius he is, is that you'd extract from the larger negative the smaller negative that you'd need for your regular release. So rather than doing different versions or whatever, you'd have one definitive version that you could transfer to your other distribution formats. And that stuck in the back of my head. So when we came to do it on The Dark Knight, we figured out how to do that, how to shoot an IMAX negative, which is a very tall frame, but frame within that protect for a cinemascope version, which is like the clip we just showed. Where Cameron was turning to 3D to immerse his audiences, Nolan was turning to IMAX. IMAX is another experience we tend to associate with these expanded ratios, and also one that is uniquely immersive. In a grand theater presentation, the screens are massive. Coupled with stadium style seating that puts you quite close to the screen, you'll find that much of the image actually occupies your peripheral vision, which creates a bit of a framing conundrum. Again, you're not just playing with traditional framing. You're playing with the fact that you can only take in a certain amount of the screen. So therefore, you've got to make sure that what's at the bottom left-hand side of the screen is not that relevant, because you don't want, unless this is part of the story, unless you want the eye going down to the bottom. Because it's not just an eye flick. It's a head move. And so, you know, if suddenly you're playing down there, it's got to be a really good reason. GT screens are around six stories tall, and the image literally feels like it envelops you, which leads to frames like this. Notice how much of the composition is centered and surrounded by negative space? However, calling this negative space is a bit of a misnomer. In a grand theater, this area exists outside our central field of view. Here, it serves the important purpose of adding to the immersive experience. Add in the bassy, low-end frequencies IMAX is known for, and you literally feel like you're watching the film from within it. You can see the spies scattered over the surface. It pushes you to a way of looking at cinematography where you're not looking at the proscenium, you're not looking at the frame, and making two-dimensional compositions. You're really just putting the camera in proximity to the actors, and you're composing in a three-dimensional sense. You're sort of composing situationally. It's an alternate way of storytelling, but one that I would argue needs to be altered to keep the filmmaker's intent on smaller screens. You see, all these compositional elements that work so well on the IMAX screen don't quite maintain the effect when presented in a traditional theater. When viewed at this relative size, these compositions actually do look like they have excessive negative space, precisely because parts of the image meant for the outer boundaries of our field of view are now smack dab in the middle of it. And then there's the matter of the ratio switching. If we maintain IMAX's constant image width for scenes when the frame shrinks down, we get this. A postage stamp in the middle of the screen. It kind of reminds me of the letterboxd films on that tiny tube TV in the 90s. Sure, we've maintained the aspect ratio, but at what cost? See, filmmakers must alter their frame in order to maintain compositional intent. In IMAX, we get these immersive 1-4-3 scenes, but for scope and flat releases, we get a crop. However, Nolan doesn't consider this boxing the image in. When it's IMAX version, the extreme top and bottom, it's really about the peripheral vision. It's really kind of filling out the frame rather than boxing it in. So it's a lesser question of seeing things get boxed into particular compositions and more a question of pulling the frame away for that version. And so it translates, I think, very well to the other formats as well for that reason. It's a frame that maintains the emotional impact of the composition, but that's better suited for the widescreen format. But interestingly, Nolan gives us something back for the physical release. He restores the expanding ratio. IMAX scenes now fill the 1-7-8-1 screen. We get the sensation of the film filling the frame, but in a way that's better suited to the 16x9 ratio of the HDTV screen. I guess we could call this the IMAX effect on the small screen. So what's so controversial? Well, IMAX marketing definitely plays into this. And listen, I geek out over these expanded frames too, but focusing on what percentage of a film's runtime is in one particular ratio kind of distorts the nuances at play that movies aren't experienced one frame at a time. Well, I guess technically they are, but add in 24 of those whirring by per second and the optical illusion of persistence of vision, and well, you've got a movie. One where you can get lost in the frame, whether that's on a screen six stories high or the humble 20-foot tall screen at my local neighborhood theater. In a way, we're kind of back to what James Cameron was doing in the 90s, adjusting the image for the different releases, but importantly, he was planning for each. Just look at his ground glass for Terminator 2, his second film shot in the Super 35 format. Each extraction has been carefully planned for during the shoot. In Kodak's behind-the-scenes coverage for Oppenheimer, we find this, presumably ground glass from Hoytev and Hoytema's IMAX cameras viewfinder. And again, a plan that accounts for each format. And in a promotional video for Doom Part 2, well, there they are again. Frame lines on the monitor, carefully composing with each deliverable in mind. This isn't the pan and scan of yesteryear that cropped Starchild out of the frame. It's actually quite the opposite. Here, the filmmakers are carefully framing their intentions for every possible venue. The idea that you're getting less or hyper-fixating on a crop is a bit like missing the forest for the trees. And it's forgetting that these filmmakers are telling a story, and that there's more power within the frame than whatever shape it happens to be. I hear sometimes, or I read sometimes, like, oh, this is how we want the audience to see the film, or this is the way you should see it, because that's the way we want it. But I don't experience, or I don't feel it like that. I don't think that it's up to us to tell people how they should watch the film. It's much more up to us to feel that responsibility to make every version as good as we possibly can. So I would like to believe that it doesn't matter on what platform you watch it. You always get that version that we have put a lot of extra attention into. You know what I mean? And yeah, in the end, people just watch it exactly the way they want to watch it. And that's up to them. And the only thing we can do is make it as good as we can, you know?