It was late Saturday night when, fresh off the plane from Los Angeles, a large delivery of numerous crates of IMAX film reels were delivered to the museum. Avatar had arrived! But the work had only just begun.
With an estimated construct time of 23 hours, our hardworking projection team started to splice and fuse all the reels into the one complete film. At 165 minutes, Avatar is the largest and longest IMAX film print ever made.
Here you can see some exclusive behind-the-scenes shots of our IMAX manager Dick Vaughan and projectionist Tony Cutts putting the final touches to the final reel of the right-eye portion of the film. The aspect ratio for the IMAX version is 1.78:1, giving an image that is proportionally taller than previous DMR releases—these are films that have been digitally remastered to be shown on the giant IMAX screen. This format has been chosen by James Cameron personally after extensive consultation.
