Christopher Nolan’s IMAX ‘The Odyssey’: It’s all done with mirrors

Crew reveal the mirror system built to let actors keep eye contact around IMAX's bulky camera blimp on Nolan's The Odyssey.

As the first mostly positive, occasionally hyperbolic, reviews of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey come out, we’re also learning a bit more about some of the workarounds the crew had to come up with to accommodate the IMAX cameras used to shoot the whole thing end-to-end.

The use of the new IMAX Keighley cameras is well-documented, but as this small featurette from IMAX and Universal Pictures illustrates rather well, previous generation IMAX cameras were also used within blimp housings. And those mothers are big.

Maintaining sightlines

One of the interesting things to emerge from that video was a system that had to be devised by the crew to let actors act in front of each other for front-on shots of their characters. So large were the blimp-housed cameras that they got in the way of any rational sightline, so a special mirror system had to be developed. Think of it as a periscope on its side. This allowed the actors to talk and emote directly ‘around’ the camera’s bulk and maintain conventional framing.

“It feels like you're shooting a scene with an SUV,” comments Robert Pattinson who plays Antinous. “But even with the size of the camera you just feel like the machine should move slower, and it moves faster than if you were shooting it on an iPhone.”

And respect to the camera op in the scene below. While our April Fools' piece about IMAX 140mm joked about needing to specifically work out to handle the new cameras, having seen someone running backwards with a real one, we suspect more than some gym time is required even now.