Page "Cinerama" Paragraph 7

How Cinerama is projectedIn theaters, Cinerama film was projected from three projection booths arranged in the same crisscross pattern as the cameras.

They projected onto a deeply curved screen, the outer thirds of which were made of over 1100 strips of material mounted on " louvers " like a vertical venetian blind, to prevent light projected to each end of the screen from reflecting to the opposite end and washing out the image.

This was a big-ticket, reserved-seats spectacle, and the Cinerama projectors were adjusted carefully and operated skillfully.

To prevent adjacent images from creating an overilluminated vertical band where they overlapped on the screen, vibrating combs in the projectors, called " jiggolos ," alternately blocked the image from one projector and then the other ; the overlapping area thus received no more total illumination than the rest of the screen, and the rapidly-alternating images within the overlap smoothed out the visual transition between adjacent image " panels.

" Great care was taken to match color and brightness when producing the prints.

Nevertheless, the seams between panels were usually noticeable.

Optical limitations with the design of the camera itself meant that if distant scenes joined perfectly, closer objects did not ( parallax error ).

A nearby object might split into two as it crossed the seams.

To avoid calling attention to the seams, scenes were often composed with unimportant objects such as trees or posts at the seams, and action was blocked so as to center actors within panels.

This gave a distinctly " triptych-like " appearance to the composition even when the seams themselves were not obvious.

It was often necessary to have actors in different sections " cheat " where they looked in order to appear to be looking at each other in the final projected picture.

Enthusiasts say the seams were not obtrusive ; detractors disagree.

Lowell Thomas, an investor in the company with Mike Todd, was still raving about the process in his memoirs thirty years later.