A Quick Q&A with Matt Lorenz, the IMAX Projectionist at The Franklin Institute

After checking out Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol at the Tuttleman IMAX at The Franklin Institute, I went back a week later to take a tour of the projection booth and talk with some of the fine folks who work there. What I found was the folks that manage and work in the theater are not just IMAX geeks, but really knowledgeable film geeks in general.

I also decided to interview the projectionist Matt Lorenz about what it’s like working with the format and took some pics of the booth to share. Being as interested in film as I am, I had a lot of fun chatting with Matt about working with one of the hottest formats out there right now.

So how did you become the projectionist at the Tuttleman IMAX?

Wow, that’s interesting. I was unemployed and I had done some theater work in live performance, doing sound engineering and that sort of thing. I actually applied to be one of the ticket takers and what they call a console operator here. What the entails is essentially working in all the theaters and the planetarium, introducing the shows and that sort of thing.

A projectionist position opened up and I got it. A lot of it is very specific training. So unless you studied IMAX somewhere else, a lot of it is just having some technical know-how and being able to learn it. It’s almost like assembly line work in terms of its repetitive motion, but once you understand how it works its pretty easy.

What kind of training did that entail?

Again, it’s very specific especially with a lot of the soundtrack stuff, computer knowledge is important. Some math skills are kind of important in terms of when you are trying to sync up soundtracks you need to count frames and break it down into minutes and seconds. So not complex math but you need to think not abstractly, but when you’re assembling film there are a lot of things you have to keep in mind in terms of head and tail and emulsion.

We train for a month before we can run any film. I was trained by the chief projectionist here and pretty much just followed him and did a lot of practice running films in the off hours, so that if anything went wrong there is not a live audience in there. It’s really just getting to know the equipment here.

The fish-eye lens of the IMAX projector they use to project on the Tuttleman IMAX dome which is 70 feet across and 4.5 stories tall.

What are some of the advantages of IMAX?

It’s the best you can do in terms of the size and resolution of the print. Digital can’t match it yet and if they can match it with the resolution they don’t have the lamp power to make it bright enough to make it worthwhile. The soundtracks is similar. I think we have a great sound system that we just put in here, which the dome theater really helps.

Because you have those speakers behind that steel grid and it pushes the sound around similar to the planetarium, where the sound just bounces around everywhere.I think that is really effective in surrounding you and again with the dome you get those visuals that can sometime be dizzying, because your entire field of vision can be moving. It’s the thickest highest resolution film, with the most powerful lamp that I know of.

The lamp was designed by NASA to light runways, the original bulb was produced by them for nighttime landings and launches.

Finally what do you think about IMAX being embraced more as a mainstream format now by directors like Christopher Nolan?

I think it’s great. I think it shows their interest in getting some of the best visuals that they can and I worry what is going to happen with it. Because its funny it’s getting so popular now as digital is starting to catch up slowly.  But I know it’s a lot of money and the film and shooting it, everything is more costly.

I just think they are a little late in the game, I think it would have been great to see some other films embrace it since IMAX has been around for 40 years and its only been in the last 5 to 10 years that they have really started to use the format. I know Mission Impossible 4 has some footage and The Dark Knight Rises will as well use both and from an artistic standpoint I think it’s the best you can do.

I think now it’s a lot of artists who are battling the companies who don’t want to spend the money.  But they are saying no I have a vision and it’s THIS big.

IMAX film is so heavy it’s stored horizontally on these huge platters. You can see the difference between a standard IMAX film at the top, which usually run about an hour and compare that to the bottom platter used for something like Mission: Impossible -Ghost Protocol.