How it began
The filmmakers Graeme Ferguson and Roman Kroitor each made multi-screen films, Polar Life and Labyrinth, for Expo 67 in Montreal. With Robert Kerr they founded Multiscreen Corporation, now Imax Corporation, to build one large-format system in place of many projectors. They brought in the engineer William Shaw. The first film in the format, Tiger Child, opened at the Fuji pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan, in the spring of 1970.
Before it existed
The large-screen films at Expo 67 used several projectors at once, running side by side. Lining up the separate images so that they looked seamless caused technical complications. The founders wanted a single projector and a single strip of film that could fill a screen of the same size, with a frame ten times larger than that of standard 35 millimeter film.
How it works
A new camera ran 65 millimeter film horizontally to expose the large frame. No existing projector could move that much film. The company bought a patent for a rolling loop projector from Ronald Jones, a machine shop owner in Brisbane, Australia, and Shaw adapted it to the larger size, working with Jones mostly by air mail. Early prototypes shredded film at 24 frames per second until Shaw showed mathematically that a revised design would work.
Who pushed back
Money was the main obstacle. At one point Ferguson and Kerr needed 100,000 dollars to continue work on the projector. Kroitor obtained an advance from Fuji, with the projector, which did not yet work, as collateral. The founders also faced discouragement during the long effort to make the machine run without destroying film.
What lasted
Ontario Place in Toronto bought the Expo 70 projector. It was brought back from Japan, refined and installed in the spring of 1971 in the Cinesphere theater, with North of Superior as the first film. The next step was a version for a dome screen, called Omnimax, first installed in a new kind of planetarium in San Diego.
