The film industry went through a series of rapid technological changes in the early 1950's.
New color film stocks, such as Eastmancolor and Anscocolor
were cheaper and easier to use than Technicolor
and new widescreen systems
such as Cinerama and CinemaScope
and even 3D were revolutionizing how films were shot and presented.
The bulky Technicolor camera was largely incompatible with these processes
and was phased out by the end of 1954.
To compete with the widescreen craze, Technicolor launched Technirama in 1956
with the Italian-American co-production, The Monte Carlo Story.
This proprietary process built upon different principles used in CinemaScope and VistaVision.
From VistaVision, Technicolor used the idea of running the film sideways in the camera.
A standard camera would typically run the 35mm film vertically
to record an image that was four perforations high.
By turning the film on its side and running it horizontally
the image size was no longer limited by the width of the film.
Technirama had a frame that was 8 perforations wide
and two times larger than a standard 35mm frame.
This significantly improved the resolution.
And like CinemaScope, Technirama used a special lens on the camera
to squeeze or compress a wider image onto the film frame.
This squashed image was then expanded again during projection.
The Technirama cameras were modified from old three-color cameras.
The interior mechanisms were removed and rebuilt by the Mitchell Camera Corporation.
The upgraded cameras used Eastmancolor negative film, but the resulting prints
were still made by the dye-transfer process.
Because the image area was twice the size as a normal frame
the film itself had to move through the camera at twice the speed
so the magazines or film reels needed to be larger.
The Technirama camera re-used the lenses from the three-color camera.
And another lens, known as the Delrama lens, was then added in front of this
to squeeze the image one and half times.
Technirama films were rarely exhibited the way they were shot
because it required a special projector, running horizontally.
Instead, most people saw Technirama films from standard 35mm prints.
Although the frame size was reduced during the printing, the image remained sharper
and less grainy than if it had come from an ordinary negative.
More than sixty films were made in Technirama between 1956 and the mid-1960’s
both in the United States and in Europe.
The increased resolution meant the process was particularly well suited for epics and historical dramas
films that took advantage of location photography and large casts.
Notable examples include The Vikings, The Big Country and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard.
But even musicals and comedies adopted the process
including films such as The Music Man and The Pink Panther.
In 1959, Super Technirama 70 was launched to take advantage
of the increased resolution offered by 70mm prints.
Films continued to be shot on a horizontal 35mm negative, then were optically printed onto 70mm film.
Walt Disney’s animated Sleeping Beauty and the historical epic
Solomon and Sheba were among the first titles released this way.
By the mid-1970’s, the Technirama cameras were no longer being used
so many were sold for use in visual effects.
They continued to be used this way into the 1990’s because the increased resolution
and finer grain was particularly well suited to combining multiple effects layers.