CANADIAN IMAX SYSTEMS SWEEP EXPO 90 

The visual and sound images at Japan's first-class Expo 90 in Osaka are dominated by a Canadian development: IMAX films. Four separate pavilions are using this "made-here" technology to astound, amuse and educate the anticipated 40 million attendees to this, the highest ranking of all world expositions.

If you haven't yet seen an IMAX film, with its projections onto giant rectangular screens up to eight storeys high, run do not walk to your nearest IMAX theatre. It is a truly different experience. The film size alone is ten times larger than the conventional 35 mm film. Today there are 65 permanent IMAX theatres in 15 countries, including one in Vancouver and another in Toronto.

IMAX premiered at Osaka's first world fair 20 years ago, although the techniques had its roots in EXPO '67 where multi-screen films starred. More than 20 fairs have featured IMAX systems.

Osaka has four IMAX theatres. The original IMAX, a 20-minute production called "Flying Raft", shown in the Sankin-Kai Heartopia Pavilion, fills the viewer's peripheral vision during a trip to the misty jungles of South America to study the colorful animals, birds, plants and insects of the tropical rainforest. Much of the show was shot from a "rainbow" airship and from a flying inflatable "raft" lowered onto the jungle canopy from the airship.

But the show at the Sanwa Midori-Kai Pavilion may be the most exciting. The debut of the latest IMAX technology, the IMAX "MAGIC CARPET", which as well as showing their now-normal wrap-around screen (18 metres high, 25 meters wide) consists of two IMAX projectors and two giant screens. One is in front of the audience, as usual, but another giant screen is visible through a transparent floor, underneath. This innovative system, enhanced by directional sound, makes people feel as if they are floating in space or flying on the magic carpet of Arabian Nights. The 15-minute film, "Flowers in the Sky", follows the life-cycle of millions of Monarch butterflies as they migrate from Canada south to the mountain valleys of Mexico.

At the Suntory Pavilion, wildlife needs wilderness is the theme in the "THE LAST BUFFALO", an IMAX 3-D picture that focuses on the environment and wildlife of the Canadian west. This type of projection, which premiered at EXPO '86 in Vancouver, Canada requires newly-designed 3-D glasses of increased lens size with high efficiency polarizing filters. Audiences gasp as they reach out to grab the almost touchable images.

The new IMAX SOLIDO prototype system, being premiered in the Fujitsu Pavilion, is the first motion picture system to present high quality, full color, stereoscopic images on a wraparound screen. The 3-D image extends in front, above and to the sides of the viewer. The viewer seems to be inside the image itself. 3-D objects pass by you and through you! The film is "Echoes of the Sun", a 20-minute, US$32 million production with sensational 3-D supercomputer graphics by Fujitisu. It shows, as never before, how photosynthesis converts sunlight into stored energy in plants, which subsequently provide energy to animals and man. Cordless, liquid crystal glasses (filled with LC diodes, the same material that creates the numbers on a digital watch) are vital to this experience. You "travel" inside living organisms.

More information: Juliane Brown, External Communications Coordinator, Imax Systems Corp., 38 Isabella Street, Toronto, Ontario M4Y 1N1

Phone: 416/960-8509. Fax: 416/960-8596.

* * *

< previous | chapter index | next >
back to Main Chapter Listing
back to Home Page