Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Lion King (Imax)

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Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 01-13-2003, 07:23 PM:

From the forever TOO DARK BEFORE THE SHOW Marcus Imax, Columbus, OH. (I'm getting better...didn't bang the shins this time.)

First, 3 great trailers. THE YOUNG BLACK STALLION (notice the credits and green band title are framed low on this one!) looks to be pretty good. Some very crisp, clear photography. GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS looks to be one of the most incredible 3-D films ever made...3-D IMAX views of the Titanic. The 2-D trailer was very impressive...just can't wait to see this one. ALLADDIN will be next Decembers "IMAX and large format theatre" Disney attraction.

Also, nice to see the return of the KODAK trailer with the 42 Disney films showing simultaneously (for a listing, see the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST thread from a year ago. I assume it's the same one).

OK, on to LION KING. The opening number has to be one of the most perfect openings to any film ever. I could leave after the final "boom" and be satisfied. But the film moves on and keeps up at this amazing level.

I thought the animation looked a little too flat. Lots of large surfaces with little color shading...a minor point, but it made the film look a little too "cartoony". Whiskers looked pasted on.

The color...ahh, the color. Color here is outstanding. Check out Zazu's beak. Rich, deep colors.

The sound is the best thing going here. From the opening cry to the end of the credits, the sound is terrific. The surrounds are used constantly and very effectively. Full, rich, enveloping sound. Lots of very subtle noises throughout, sounding like a real jungle. And James Earl Jones and Jeremy Irons have low resonances that sound like they even tickle the sub-woofer range. (They got away with Jeremy Irons saying "You have no idea", so why couldn't James Earl tell Simba "I am your father!"?)

A very effective use of the giant screen. My personal favorite of the "Big 4" (Mermaid, BATB, Aladdin, LK) is still Beauty and the Beast. Lots of tears welling up in that one...more than Lion King, but still a wonderful experience.

I sat in the same row with a girl of about age 3, who stood up the entire time totally enraptured by the film and the huge image. Many children in the audience who all seemed to enjoy the picture.

A grade A+ presentation by the excellent Marcus Imax team. Too bad the music has to be the generic Movie Tunes (although the Mannheim Steamroller piece sounded very nice.)

[ 01-14-2003, 09:54 AM: Message edited by: Mark Lensenmayer ]

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 01-13-2003, 09:05 PM:

I feel that The Lion King looks and sounds light years better than Beauty and the Beast did repurposed to the large format screen.

And rumour has it that The Little Mermaid will be the Christmas 2005 release, but I haven't heard anything from Disney on this.

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 01-13-2003, 11:02 PM:

Saw this a few weeks ago in 1570(IMAX) at Edwards Irvine Spectrum 21, and then again last week in 870 at SoCal Movie Experience 17 Murietta.

1570 IMAX Version
ABOSLUTELY AWSOME!!!!
This has always been my hands-down favorate traditionally animated film. I have seen it at least 100 times on VHS, and twice in the first theatrical realese. I thought i had seen everything this film had to offer. But from the moment we sweep over Pride Rock, i realized that with the IMAX format, it was as if i had been transported INTO the film. This is normal for IMAX of course, but i think what impacted me so much about it was the fact that this was a compleatly created world. Yeah, with films like Everest, and Blue Plannet, its easy to accept that IMAX has transported us there. These places egxist. But for the first time, an IMAX film transported me into a place outside of reality, rendered by the team at Disney. Every paint and pencil stroke is visable. ( I think i also saw some of the animators sweat and tears in a few frames). The story comes to life withe 10 times the power. If you live anywhere within 4 hours of a 1570 location playing this YOU NEED TO SEE IT.

870 (standard 70mm format)
Not even near as visually impactful. Real changes aplenty. The odd aspect ratio looks strange on a smaller screen, almost a perfect square. The sound is phenomanal, and in many ways better than the IMAX version. The auditorium i saw it at had 70mm DTS. Also, when i peaked inside the booth, i saw a bottle of film-guard. ( [beer]

to SoCal Murietta!) However, the real changes are a bit dirty, and the trailers were cut improperly. But the image was clear and clean otherwise. The film just did not impress me in this format. I think this version would look much better on a larger screen (at least 60 ft wide.) This was about 35-40 ft wide. Not even close to "Giant Screen" in my book.

Overall a great experience both times. Cant wait for Aladdin!
What i would realy like to see though is a blow up of a PIXAR film. It would be easy for PIXAR to simply re render a film in Higher rez at 60fps. That would be breathtaking. They could even write a program to render the film in the IMAX3D format!!
"A Bug's Life - The IMAX 3D Experience" [Cool]

Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 01-14-2003, 09:52 AM:

Adam,

I think I have an explanation for the somewhat flat look of Lion King. In BATB, you have many characters of varied colors against a darker background palette. The human characters are, by nature, multi-colored, as are the "objects" in the castle. BUT, in Lion King, you have the lions and the hyenas who are predominiately mono-hued against a flat mono-hued background...flat because the country pictured is flat. That is why the characters with a lot of color, such as the beak of the bird, jump off the screen.

Little Mermaid seems to be the logical choice for 2005, but THEN what? TOY STORY would be an excellent choice (they've already proven that rearranging the characters for the "squarish" format is possible), if Pixar and Disney are still in business together, but I don't know how excited I'd be about BAMBI or PINOCCHIO.

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 01-14-2003, 02:11 PM:

Where are characters being rearranged on the screen? The CAPS system that Disney is using basically scans the hand-drawn image at a super high resolution for storage and they are able to output it at a high enough resolution for it to produce a large format negative. The only changes from that point are the generation of super-fine details (like the horrible hack-job they did on the faces of far away people in Beauty, etc.) where the detail would never have shown up in a 35mm print. The changes for the shape of the screen only involve cropping the sides off to produce a 1.66 letterboxed image for the 1.44 shaped screen.

Are you sure you're not confusing Disney's system with the joke system "FlikFX" Marty Hart has on the widescreen museum site? [Wink]

For 2006 (or sooner) the next logical step would be to release Toy Story, but that can actually go even further. With the Shrek project that was aborted by Dreamworks, Imax has proven the ability to take a computer-animated film and convert it to 3D. (No, I don't know why Dreamworks aborted the project, other than it had nothing to do with what the results looked like.)

Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 01-14-2003, 02:52 PM:

My apologies for not being clear. By "rearranging on the screen", I was referring to the PIXAR films, which modified some of the character positions to better fit the traditional television screen on the DVD's, instead of just a cropped "pan-and-scan" image. I did not mean to imply that any rearraning had taken place in BATB or LK.

The ANTZ segment from CYBERWORLD proved they could generate an excellent 3-D image. I agree...that would be very nice.

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 01-14-2003, 04:26 PM:

I get it now. [Smile]

By the way, Mike, 8/70 is not "standard 70mm". That would be 5-perf 70mm. Also, I'd like to hear your view on the DTS audio being better than the Imax audio. Since the DTAC sound system uses uncompressed .wav files as a source, I would think it was something about the theater itself.

Posted by Mike Williams (Member # 1140) on 01-14-2003, 06:06 PM:

Is 8/70 printed sideways on the film like IMAX? Does it use any type of anamorphic lense to achieve the correct aspect ratio? I've never seen anything in 8/70 so I am curious.

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 01-14-2003, 06:25 PM:

8/70 is a vertical pulldown and does not use an anamorphic lens. I have a piece of it around here somewhere that I'll eventually find, scan and post.

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 01-15-2003, 01:39 PM:

My bad. 570 is correct standard.
Im not sure if the Lion King I saw was 870 or 570. It's a little hard to count perfs through a port window.

I agree that the audio was related to the room. The IMAX audio, allthough it has an uncompressed source, still has to fill a large room. The speakers installed at the IMAX in Irvine, either aren't powerfull enough to fill the room, or the projectionist opted to turn down the volume (WHY!?). The LFE and volume were much better in the smaller room, even with DTS compression.

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 01-15-2003, 05:16 PM:

You need to come up to Sacramento and see it in a real Imax theater where we know how to blow the doors off the joint. [Smile]

I'll even let you in free and give you a tour of the booth.

The print you saw was 8/70.

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 01-15-2003, 08:46 PM:

Does the IMAX theatre in Sacramento still turn off the sound over the end credits to make announcements? It did when I saw EVEREST, T-REX (3-D), and FANTASIA 2000.

Great theatre otherwise (although I was surprised to view the threading of the film in the booth by the projectionist through the observation deck, and then seeing the same employee selling concessions a few minutes later).

I'll be seeing LION KING and SPACE STATION 3-D weekend after this.

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 01-15-2003, 09:15 PM:

When I saw Scorpion King at the Edwards Irvine IMAX ("Enhanced for Giant Screen" 35mm print or something like that), the sound was the best part of the show. Very impressive.

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 01-18-2003, 08:02 PM:

Right now, we should only be running the exit announcement on busy shows of The Lion King (against my better judgement).

Are you coming here to see those films? If so, please email me.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 01-20-2003, 09:38 AM:

Link to illustration of various 70mm formats:

http://home.earthlink.net/~williamsdp/Tech_Hearst.html

70mm 8-perf:

http://www.edgecinema.com.au/format_comparison.htm

70mm 15-perf:

http://www.imax.com/experience/large_format_film.html?m=spacestation

Resolution tables:

http://www.celco.com/format_4k.htm

http://www.bipack.com/ResChart.htm

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 01-21-2003, 02:56 PM:

Adam,

I have not seen "THE LION KING" in IMAX but plan to see it very soon. The only thing that bothers me about seeing IMAX movies here at the Waikiki IMAX is the admission price. Yes, I know IMAX film rental is very expensive but because of the high cost of admission, a lot of my friends who love to see it in IMAX have decided to pass because of the expensive ticket prices. The regular adult admission here is $10.00 and the senior price which I qualify is only a dollar less at $9.00. When I saw previous IMAX films at the Waikiki IMAX including "BEAUTY & THE BEAST" and "ATTACK OF THE CLONES", the theatre had only about 35 people Max! All of the other times I have been there, IMAX films played in an almost empty auditorium. I have seen IMAX films before at the Luxor in Las Vegas and at the Lincoln Centre IMAX in New York City and do not recall paying as much as Hawaii's admission price. What is the cost of admission in Sacramento and elsewhere? By the way, regular film ticket prices is about $8.00 and $5.00 for seniors at the Ward and $4.75 at most other theatres. There is a three dollar difference for regular films. When only $1.00 for IMAX?

-Claude

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 01-21-2003, 08:05 PM:

I may be wrong here, but I believe IMAX film rentals are actually considerably lower than standard first-run films. I think Disney is getting 50 percent for their films, which is considerably more than the typical IMAX fare (15-20 percent of the boxoffice going to the distributor, an additional 5 percent royalty fee to IMAX, which covers the lease of the projection equipment). However, in the case of the low rental films, marketing and advertising is payed by the theatre/institution presenting the film. Also, the cost of the print is fronted by the theatre (which I believe gets reimbursed after the run of the film). I think $11 has become fairly standared for the Disney IMAX films. I know when the Edwards Valencia IMAX theatre was still running those 45 minute documentaries, admission for 2-D films was actually lesss than their regular 35mm films. It should be noted the IMAX presentations will cost more to operate (more powerful lamphouses, on-duty operator, better sound system).

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 01-21-2003, 09:02 PM:

We are currently charging $12 Adult, $11 Senior, $10 Child for The Lion King. We were charging the same for Attack of the Clones except on weekends when it all jumped $3 to make an adult ticket $15.

If I had to pay to see 35mm movies at Century Theatres, [Wink]

I'd have to shell out $8.75 for general admission with seniors and kids at $5.25.

Large format film contracts are completely different from conventional film contracts. Typically a theater has to guarantee x number of showings, y number of tickets sold for the run of the film, and a minimum $z per-ticket royalty to the distributor. It is not uncommon to have to pay $30,000 or more up front just to get the print delivered to the theater. Then you have to get 50,000 people to pay to see the movie during the run in order to break even once operating costs, marketing costs and equipment royalties are paid.

Ironically, no one showed up for our 6:15 show of Adventures in Wild California, so I was browsing the forums.

As far as the difference in Adult:Senior price ratios, we have a much higher attendance of children and seniors (compared to conventional cinema) and a (generally) more attractive film library for those groups, so the market will bear a higher admission price.

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 01-21-2003, 11:00 PM:

Claude,

Regular admission is actually HIGHER here in Bakersfield (for normal films). $8.25 general, $6 for bargain matinee!

Posted by Barry Floyd (Member # 385) on 03-03-2003, 10:17 AM:

Yesterday afternoon, I took my "almost" 3 year old son to go see The Lion King at the Opry Mills Imax theatre here in Nashville. We were celebrating our third consecutive day of "Dry Pants" (which is a big deal at our house), and I thought I'd treat him to something special.

Anyway, we drive to Nashville, find a place to park and go buy our $11.00 tickets to a movie we already have at home on video.

Once we get our tickets, we make our way down through the Imax tunnel and climb the steps up into the auditorium. We walk in at mid-level of the theatre, and the screen was overwhelming. He asked - "What's that?...pointing towards the huge screen. I said, "That's the movie screen." "That's not a movie", he replied.

We tried out several seats, moved all of the armrests up and down, and finally settled into our seats once the lights went down. Once the announcements were over and the screen lit up he looked over to me and asked, "That's the movie, Daddy?" I said, "Yes buddy, that's the movie".

Then he said.... "Where's the cars?"

I just then realized.... he had never been to an indoor theatre before in his life. He just naturally assumed that all people watched movies from their cars. [thumbsup]

The presentation was almost flawless. There was a couple of "horizontal" scatches on the print that showed up like a huge "bubbly line" running across the screen.

Maybe it's just my eyes, but the "close-ups" on the characters of Scar and Musafa didn't show clean crisp lines like I expected, but rather showed kind of jagged edges in their place. I guess you can only blow up a hand drawn image so much before the crispness of the detail is lost. After seeing this show and hearing the great use of the surrounds throughout the theatre, I have to admit I was impressed.

Like the others have said above, the richness of the colors was outstanding!

Although, if I want the same type of visual, and didn't mind loosing some of the surround effects, next time I might just lay a blanket on the ground under the drive-in screen.

Great job to the folks at Regal "Opry Mills" Imax.. great presentation, clean auditorium.