I've seen the two Disney IMAX releases (Fantasia 2000 and Beauty and the Beast), and was roundly disappointed, as was my wife, who's one of the biggest Disney freaks imaginable. The big problem for me was that the IMAX screen is so big, you have to make a conscious decision where to look. This works well for most of the IMAX-specific films, where there's either one obvious thing to look at (e.g., the mountain in the middle of the screen) or you're being shown a large panorama where looking around at different things is fine.
But present-day movies are shot and edited from the perspective of a smaller, standard theater-sized screen, where you can take in the whole image at once, and where the director and editor use that fact to design the images you see -- they're deciding what you're going to be looking at and paying attention to. Show one of these movies on IMAX, and it's like watching TV with a telescope -- you've got a great view of a small area, but you miss the whole. If a character comes in from one side of the screen while you're looking at the other side, it doesn't just take a shift of attention to see them, it takes a head movement. And, as happened with the Disney releases, you end up missing more than you see.
Having said that:
* Yes, I'd LOVE to see parts of "Dark City" on an IMAX sized screen, just to appreciate the visuals.
* The real question to ask is "What would do if he/she did a movie that was planned to be IMAX-sized from the beginning?" -- where the screen size and shape is factored into the creative decisions from the beginning. We have one example of this, but I'm doing my best to forget about "Captain Eo"...
I was once a TA in a psychology of memory class, where the students were assigned a term paper. Two students each handed in a description of a simple but clever memory experiment they had allegedly done at their (different) frat houses. Another TA and I stumbled across the similarities in their writeups -- enough identical phrases and statistical results for it to be quite clear that the papers were functional copies -- and reported our findings to the professor, who flunked them both. The students -- graduating seniors -- appealed their case to the dean, who came back to the professor asking for an explanation for his decision.
Taking this as an intellectual challenge, the professor -- a mathematical psychologist -- proceeded to do the statistics to determine the probability that two different samples of people from two different frat houses could be run through the same experiment and produce exactly the same results -- identical statistics out to the 8 decimal places both students had included in their papers. The probability of this happening was appropriately small -- several billion to one at least; the dean upheld the grades.
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I've seen the two Disney IMAX releases (Fantasia 2000 and Beauty and the Beast), and was roundly disappointed, as was my wife, who's one of the biggest Disney freaks imaginable. The big problem for me was that the IMAX screen is so big, you have to make a conscious decision where to look. This works well for most of the IMAX-specific films, where there's either one obvious thing to look at (e.g., the mountain in the middle of the screen) or you're being shown a large panorama where looking around at different things is fine.
But present-day movies are shot and edited from the perspective of a smaller, standard theater-sized screen, where you can take in the whole image at once, and where the director and editor use that fact to design the images you see -- they're deciding what you're going to be looking at and paying attention to. Show one of these movies on IMAX, and it's like watching TV with a telescope -- you've got a great view of a small area, but you miss the whole. If a character comes in from one side of the screen while you're looking at the other side, it doesn't just take a shift of attention to see them, it takes a head movement. And, as happened with the Disney releases, you end up missing more than you see.
Having said that:
* Yes, I'd LOVE to see parts of "Dark City" on an IMAX sized screen, just to appreciate the visuals.
* The real question to ask is "What would do if he/she did a movie that was planned to be IMAX-sized from the beginning?" -- where the screen size and shape is factored into the creative decisions from the beginning. We have one example of this, but I'm doing my best to forget about "Captain Eo"...
I was once a TA in a psychology of memory class, where the students were assigned a term paper. Two students each handed in a description of a simple but clever memory experiment they had allegedly done at their (different) frat houses. Another TA and I stumbled across the similarities in their writeups -- enough identical phrases and statistical results for it to be quite clear that the papers were functional copies -- and reported our findings to the professor, who flunked them both. The students -- graduating seniors -- appealed their case to the dean, who came back to the professor asking for an explanation for his decision.
Taking this as an intellectual challenge, the professor -- a mathematical psychologist -- proceeded to do the statistics to determine the probability that two different samples of people from two different frat houses could be run through the same experiment and produce exactly the same results -- identical statistics out to the 8 decimal places both students had included in their papers. The probability of this happening was appropriately small -- several billion to one at least; the dean upheld the grades.