‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and the ways in which the big-screen experience is changing

The experience of watching films in cinemas has undergone a dramatic transformation over the years. From the use of 70mm film stock and the introduction of 3-D and IMAX formats to the recent trend towards a higher frame rate, moviegoers have witnessed plenty of developments aimed at dragging them away from their television sets and home theatre systems and back into the movie halls.

Higher frame rate This technology allows filmmakers to bridge the gap between screens and audiences by delivering extreme clarity and hyper-realism. Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the most recent example. The satire on war and pop patriotism, which was released in India on November 11, has been shot at 120 frames per second rather than the normal 24 FPS along with embedded 3D on 4K resolution. In the United States of America, very few theatres have shown the film the way Lee wanted it. Other cinemas have opted for 60 frames per second. In India, the technology does not exist to show the film in its intended format.

Before Billy Lynn, the major production to be shot at an enhanced FPS was Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012). The Hobbit was shot at 48 FPS, and this version was shown in select cinemas around the world, including in India. Audience members are not always comfortable with being able to spot minuscule details that they might have otherwise missed. A higher frame rate can often result in a sensory overload, which is why Hollywood isn’t rushing to embrace this technological advance just yet. “You could see where the practical set ended and the keyed-in computer generated backgrounds began,” wrote Jordan Hoffman in a rant on new technologies in The Guardian. “But perhaps a tense drama with lots of action would work with this new technology?”

70mm & Cinemascope The higher frame rate exercise is only the latest attempt by Hollywood studios to tinker with the moviegoing experience. The use of 70mm film stock, which is of a higher resolution than the more conventional 35mm, has existed since the early days of cinema. The use of 70mm film was seen in screen spectacles such as Exodus (1960), West Side Story (1961) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

The popularity of 70mm has declined along with the onset of digital technology – just like the use of regular film stock itself – but there have been efforts to keep the movement going. Christopher Nolan’s space drama Interstellar (2014) was blown up to 70mm and was screened in this format in several theatres. Other 70mm fans include Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master and Inherent Vice) and Quentin Tarantino (The Hateful Eight). In recent years, screenings of 70mm classics have also become popular in the United States, including Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Brainstorm (1983).

Related attempts to make the screen bigger than ever included CinemaScope, which used anamorphic lenses, and Cinerama, which needed three projectors at the same time along with a curved screen to show the image in its entirety. The first film to use CinemaScope was the 1953 comedy How to Marry a Millionaire, while Cinerama was deployed for How The West Was Won (1963).

3D First conceptualised in the 19th century, realised many years later. In 1922, the silent film The Power of Love was the first commercial 3-D production. The movie has now been lost.

The technology’s evolution resulted in the release of House of Wax in 1953, considered to be the first 3D feature with stereophonic sound and as well as a moment of truth – there was a way for studios to fill up theatres that had started seeing a decline in audiences. In 1961, The Mask, which was mostly shot in 2D, used 3D technology in scenes that featured the cursed mask.

It is now almost routine for tentpole movies and animated productions to be released in both 2D and 3D versions. The 3D version of the animated movie The Polar Express (2004) earned 14 times more than the 2D release. The first Pixar film in 3D, Up, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was one of the first such films along with the blockbuster Avatar to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture in 2010.

IMAX This film format, created by a Canadian company, promises viewers expanded images on a mega-sized screen. IMAX is 10 times bigger than the standard 35 mm film format. More is merrier with IMAX (a contraction of image maximum): greater depth and detail; enhanced sound (through six-channel surround systems) and a more immersive experience.

India has a handful of IMAX screens, including three in Mumbai and one each in Chennai and Hyderabad. Movies that are formatted with IMAX technology can be either 2D or 3D. Hollywood superhero films are routinely released in India in the additional IMAX format. Bollywood embraced the technology with Dhoom 3 in 2013, which was the first Indian film to use a combination of 2D and IMAX.