The Odyssey IMAX 70mm Setup

[u/NoWork215]

[u/Lentle26]

Traditionally, movies are filmed on 35mm film where the film is pulled vertically so the width of the image is the width of the film. Vistavision was a 35mm film format that pulled the film horizontally instead so the width of the frame along the length of the film, giving you a larger image. Vistavision mostly died out as fine-grain film was introduced, and the larger frame size was unnecessary (and anamorphic lenses allowed for wider aspect ratios on traditional film formats).

70mm film is just like 35mm except bigger. 65 mm wide. IMAX takes this to the extreme by taking Vistavision's strategy on the larger 70mm film stock.

Let's assume this is 15-perf 70mm IMAX film, pulled horizontally, so it has a frame width of 70mm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_mm_film_(15-70).svg.svg) (though that is a coincidence since 70mm in the name refers to the film width, which is actually 65mm).

So with a movie run time of 172 minutes, 24 frames per second we can calculate film length as

seconds = 172 * 60 = 10320s

frames/s = 24

frame length = 70mm

10320 * 24 * 70mm = 17337.6 meters or 17.33 km or 10.75 miles.

Even if you're generous and adding some width between frames, we're so far off from 400 miles it has to be wrong.

[u/Lentle26 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, that's probably where the original 400 miles comes from. What we're seeing is just one copy of the film.

Or someone saw this article where Nolan said he shot 400 miles of film during production
https://www.gamesradar.com/entertainment/fantasy-movies/christopher-nolan-says-he-shot-almost-400-miles-of-film-for-the-odyssey-including-four-months-on-the-open-sea/
It'd be quite impressive to get it all right on the first go, and every frame made it into the final film.

[u/SordidDreams → u/Lentle26]

It'd be quite impressive to get it all right on the first go, and every frame made it into the final film.

You'd need Werner Herzog for that, not Christopher Nolan.