BURBANK, CALIFORNIA — Director Christopher Nolan's upcoming film The Odyssey is the first feature shot entirely on IMAX film, and Nolan visited FotoKem in Burbank, California to oversee the assembly and processing of its 70 millimeter prints. FotoKem is the last motion picture film lab in the world that produces 70 millimeter prints for IMAX film.

IMAX film offers up to three times higher image resolution than digital cameras, but each camera magazine allows only between 2.5 and 3 minutes of continuous shooting before reloading. The cameras also produce loud operational noise that can interfere with recording actors' dialogue on set.

To address the noise, Nolan's team and IMAX developed a special housing, described as a blimp about the size of a coffin, that weighed over 300 pounds and required special steel plating on the dollies to support it. The size of the housing caused the actors' eyelines to be too extreme in two-person dialogue scenes, so IMAX, Nolan, and his photography team created a mirror system to allow actors' faces to be captured from a closer angle.

Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus in the film and previously appeared in Nolan's Interstellar and Oppenheimer, described the production approach. "In this case, he wanted to do it 100% in IMAX, which had never been done. And that wasn't even announced, because we didn't know if we could do it," Damon said. "It's a really loud camera. So for intimate scenes that would've been impossible in IMAX up until, you know, a year ago."

At FotoKem, negative assembly technician Ron Juarez demonstrated how edited scenes are assembled into a complete film, using a glue pot to apply adhesive to the edge of a cut negative and splice it to another. "These are two pieces of negative now that he's going to splice together for us. And every cut in the film – and there are thousands and there are thousands of cuts in the film – is done this way, by hand. It makes me nervous just watching him," Nolan said.

Lance Spindler, a lab color timer at FotoKem, uses an analyzer and monitor to adjust the color of a film negative according to Nolan's specifications, then makes a test print and brings it to a light table, where he places different colored filters over a frame to preview the addition of color. "We have the primary colors, and we have the secondary colors," Spindler said. "We fine tune it with our filters." Spindler assigns numerical values to color-correct each shot, and the photonegative is then run through a contact printer that projects colored light through the negative onto positive film stock to create the final release print, which is dried in a glass enclosure after a chemical bath.

"It's a massive negative, which when correctly exposed, correctly printed, and you know, projected onto a huge screen, there's an image quality there that you can't get anywhere else. Incredible sharpness. Very little visible grain," Nolan said. "Film sees very much the way the eye sees. And particularly the way it sees color, the way it sees grays, or blacks, and whites, and everything, it really means that we're getting the audience as close to the experience of being there as we can."