By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
Movie houses closed during coronavirus lockdowns. Some film producers are announcing that they will be shifting to streaming services. And some pundits are predicting that this will be the end of movies as we knew them.
To really understand why screen size matters, you need to have been to an IMAX theater. That might be one of the seven-stories-tall flat screen IMAX theaters or the rounded Omnimax versions often found at science museums.
When it comes to real life, these massive screens are the next best thing to “being there.” They fill up our field of vision. The audience sets in steeply sloped rows of seats, so the person in front of you is mostly below your field of view and you block little of the view of the person behind you.
Today’s kids, from kindergarten to college, have not experienced the 35mm film projectors that teachers used into the early 1990s. In classrooms and movie houses, we used these films to project an image that was usually bigger than even today’s large screen TVs. Students generally paid attention. Moviegoers got out their hankies and cried along with the big screen drama. But in both cases, the edge of the film still reminded you that you were not really there.
But watching the IMAX screen puts you in the front seat of the race car or dangles you over the edge of the Grand Canyon with no visible edge to the scene. IMAX audience members dodge and duck and sometimes have to leave to go vomit.
Introduced in 1970, this Canadian technology became known for its convincing realism. Unlike the vertical 35mm reels, their 70mm film had to run sideways through a projector and held ten times the image for higher resolution. Instead of two sound channels for stereo, IMAX uses six sound channels; a viewer’s ears can track the race car approaching and passing as if you were really at the track. By 1980, IMAX began converting to digital projection but this system remains the same.
In addition, IMAX introduced a genuine three dimensional image, with two high definition cameras filming a scene with their two lenses as far apart as a person’s eyes. These are then projected by two cameras in the theater. The two images are polarized and the IMAX customer wears polarized lenses allowing each eye to view what the camera’s “eyes” had seen. A regular 2D movie screen always lacked the “depth” perception that told a viewer this wasn’t quite real, even if you moved up to where the edges were beyond your vision. Adding this high resolution 3D convinces a viewer’s brain that he or she is really, really there. —Lookout! Duck!
The distance the viewer sits from the screen is also important in comparing movies with television and smartphones. The old low-definition American televisions scanned 525 lines from top to bottom. It was recommended that you watch TV sitting back a distance that was seven times the height of the TV screen. The lines didn’t stand out but the little TV only made up about ten percent of your visual field.
The first-generation high definition TV allowed a viewer to sit closer, about three times the picture height in front of the TV. And now our so-called 4K TV can be watched from a viewing distance of about one-and-a-half times the screen height without noting the lines. That is still not as “engaging” as a regular movie screen, and pitiful compared to the IMAX. And compared to the pitifully-small screens on hand-held devices held at handheld length, it is no match.
Yes, there are virtual reality headsets. But they impress on their wearer their everpresence, and they lack the sharing-of-experience of movie-going. Movie companies are not moving that direction.
IMAX is a name formed from “image maximum.” Cell phones deserve the name IMIN for image minimum. Regular theater screens are halfway between.
There is the possibility that a young generation of smartphone-addicts will settle for viewing future “movies” due to their limited experience with television and handheld screens. But as we have witnessed over these last years how often our youngsters “watch” television movies while also drifting away to scan their latest cell phone messages, we know that they already fail to recognize their lack of engagement.
Welcome to a future of (yawn) boredom.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities in 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.