IMAX, the ultimate experience on Filmmaking.

Every filmmaker has his own way of presenting his stories to the audience. There are different groups of filmmakers in the industry that can be differentiated based on the artistic and professional preferences that they share in common. Some directors like to work with very famous artists in order to attract more audience members to watch the film. Other directors or producers like to work for big studios, securing big budgets and shooting the ultimate blockbuster films. We also have the group of the independent filmmakers, the ones that threat carefully when it comes to developing their scripts, the ones who fight to the end in order to secure an actor or actress to lead their film, or even the ones who will almost sell their assets in order to bring their vision to life, after all, money is a priority when it comes to making a film a reality.

Even though there's always been a debate around the idea that most filmmakers like to shoot on film, rather than digital..there is a very particular and selective group of people who enjoy shooting their movies with IMAX cameras. Richard Gendolf is the CEO of the IMAX company, and it's been since 1994 that he became heavily involved in the film industry by coming up with this amazing technology that has enchanted the minds and the creativity of several filmmakers. Christopher Nolan, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird are some of the names of recognized filmmakers who adore to shoot in this format. They believe that the experience that it brings to their stories is incomparable to anything else in the industry.

Richard Gelfond, IMAX CEO.

Unfortunately, this is a very expensive format to shoot on. Some of the latest films that have used this "shooting" technique are "Interstellar, Star Wars Episode VII (coming soon), Fantastic 4 (coming soon), Jurassic World, etc. This only proves how big the budget of a film must be in order to be able to shoot in such a large format. Most feature films in the industry are shot in 35mm format, and all of the above mentioned are projects that surpassed a $50 million budget. The IMAX format is well known to producers because of the great revenues that generates most of the time for the studios. It is clearly another good way of making more money from the movie, in fact, a lot of blockbusters are now converted now a days from a smaller format to an IMAX one in order to expand the number of theaters where the movie will be shown at. 

Christopher Nolan on the set of Interstellar.

JJ Abrams on the set of Star Wars Episode VII.

              

Recently Richard Gendolf, the IMAX CEO talked to deadline.com about the new frontiers that IMAX is rapidly expanding and making it's way through, one of them being television. More specifically, he talked a little bit about the recent collaboration between IMAX and the famous TV series Game Of Thrones.

"The whole thing is you really have to have production value, which Game of Thrones had so it looked fantastic on the Imax screen. I don’t think you’ll ever see a game show in Imax. It has to be the right property. It has to have Imax DNA in it, which Game of Thrones did, meaning a similar kind of fan base and passion." 

All in all, I think it's fair to say that IMAX has certainly added a huge creative asset to the filmmaking world. Having the advantage of bringing this experience to the audiences is certainly a big success for the film industry as a whole. Certainly it is a great tool for the filmmakers and studios to create a win-win situation, in one hand it allows the artist to bring his vision to life and in the other end the studio opens up it's revenue sources.