A photo of a Cinerama camera

The unique technology involved with Cinerama extended beyond the filming. The following excerpt from cinema scholar David Bordwell’s blog post “The Wayward Charms of Cinerama” explores the projection demands of the Cinerama process.

Cinerama’s colossal screen size and deep curve dictated a new approach to image-making. No standard 35mm frame could fill such a wide display without losing resolution. The scale of the show demanded three projectors, each trained on one-third of the screen. The image became a triptych, with thin overlaps or “blend lines” demarcating the panels. Naturally, all three had to be exactly aligned and kept in strict synchronization. If one film reel lost frames through a mishap, for future shows projectionists snipped the corresponding frames out of the other two reels.

(credit: American Theatre Architecture Archive, Theatre Historical Society of America)