“We’re shooting 65 millimeter, 15 perf,” said the film’s associate producer, Ben Rosenblatt. “Which is about [holding up hands] that big, each frame. The exposed negative, until it’s developed, isn’t anything. It’s just a chemical reaction. If it gets opened or x-rayed at any point, poof, it’s gone.”
Transportation was another major concern, as the Burj Khalifa footage couldn’t be developed in Dubai. “The whole process of 65 film and shooting IMAX in large format is there’s pretty much one place that develops it, and that’s in Los Angeles,” said production manager/co-producer Tommy Harper. “So we would shoot on Monday in Dubai, we’d wrap the film on Monday night, can it up, put it on a flight Tuesday morning, it’d get to LA on Wednesday, and on Thursday we would have a neg check. So there would be about a four-day lag [from] the moment you shot your film to the moment that you knew your footage was okay.”
That risk paid off handsomely. As I can personally attend, this sequence is pretty astonishing looking in a theater, IMAX or otherwise. You actually feel like you’re up there with Cruise as he climbs the world’s highest skyscraper in “Ghost Protocol,” which only adds to the nail-biting tension when complications inevitably arise (especially if, like me, you’re not exactly wild about heights in general). Commercially, the outcome was just as rewarding. This sequence made “Ghost Protocol” a must-watch on the largest screen available, with IMAX sales making up nearly a quarter of the film’s total opening sales at the box office.
And to think: all of Cruise’s death-defying antics might’ve been undone by nothing more innocuous than someone accidentally opening up the exposed negative on its way around the world.
Source From: www.slashfilm.com
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