It doesn’t get much more epic than the story of the Odyssey, and director Christopher Nolan has taken that to heart. Nolan’s projects always have a true sense of scale and grandeur to them, and that is being taken to the next level in The Odyssey thanks to IMAX. Not only is the film being screened in IMAX, but Nolan went the extra mile and shot the entire film with state-of-the-art upgraded IMAX cameras, which Robert Pattinson compared to working with SUVs in an amazing new behind-the-scenes video.
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In a new IMAX Featurette for The Odyssey, Nolan reveals that it’s been a lifelong dream to film an entire movie in IMAX, but there was a problem in actually making that happen. The remedy to that problem came from upgraded cameras and a heavy-duty camera blimp, creating a massive camera rig that had to be moved around and fitted with mirrors so that actors could see each other around it. “It feels like you’re shooting a scene with like an SUV (laughs). Even with the size of the camera, you just feel like the machine would move slower, and it just moves faster than if you were shooting on an iPhone,” Pattinson said.
Christopher Nolan Just Opened The Door For Even More IMAX Films
Nolan has been an advocate of IMAX for a while now, and for The Odyssey, the plan from the beginning was to shoot the film completely on the IMAX cameras. The problem was the sound, and the featurette even reveals just how loud the older IMAX cameras are. During any given scene, you can clearly hear the camera rolling, and that can distract even the most disciplined actors.
Producer Emma Thomas reveals that they actually went to IMAX to see if they could create new cameras that were quieter or create a blimp that could quiet down the sound, and it turns out they managed to do both. IMAX introduced a new camera that was better at limiting noise, but to make sure there weren’t any issues, they created a blimp to limit it even more, though as you can see in the video, the combination of the two resulted in a huge apparatus to move around.
It took multiple people to move it from place to place, but as Pattinson and others remarked during the video, before long it became easier and easier to move the whole thing to even the most crowded of areas. This now sets up IMAX in a major way, as more films can benefit from the improvements IMAX made for The Odyssey. We could see even more films embrace IMAX cameras moving forward now that a core issue has been solved, and if that happens, Nolan will have played a part in making the format even more popular.
The Odyssey is set to hit theaters on July 17th.
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Image courtesy of Sony Pictures
