The Epics – Matte Shots – Part 10

Twentieth Century Fox hit paydirt in September 1953 with the much ballyhooed exhibition of the first ever CinemaScope widescreen presentation THE ROBE. The culmination of years of development by French scientist Professor Henri Chretien, Hollywood mogul Darryl F.Zanuck recognised a great gimmick when he saw it and wisely took an option on the process and applying the trade name ‘CinemaScope’.

CinemaScope was a means of optically squeezing an image vertically in camera during the original photography by shooting through a specially engineered elongated anamorphic lens and presenting that same processed and edited ‘squeezed’ footage later in cinemas by projecting that same squeezed footage back through, in essence the same lens, though this time orientated to horizontally unsqueeze the compressed image to a considerable width, generally two and a half times the width of standard ‘flat’ 35mm exhibition (2.35:1)…

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A Tribute to Golden Era Special FX

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