Jump to content

Techniscope


Recommended Posts

I was on a film shot in Techniscope in the 70s, Apocalypse 2000 in which Kirk Douglas played a starring role. It was an Italian co production which I suppose explains the choice of Techniscope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techniscope

There was a sequence where the camera was attached to the door of a car (maybe a Rolls Royce) by a giant sucker arrangement as they drove past Buckingham Palace. The artist who was driving did not allow for this and wiped the camera out by driving too close to the street furniture. Much amusement from the crew, hardly disguised at all.

Later on in  Rome we shot in Safa Palatino Studios, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safa_Palatino_Studios where the convention of being quiet for for synch shooting was somewhat alien as most Italian films at the time were post-synched. Rather a trial for us in the sound crew as stage hands would suddenly engage in heated discussion halfway through a shot. Trevor, our Sound Camera operator, learned how to 'Running' in the Neapolitan dialect (Partooto), which caused great amusement among the Italians.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

We had a little bit of a resurgence of Techniscope around here during the last days of film shooting for corpo and live-show-roll-in pieces in the early to mid '90s.  Shooters would get older Arri IIc or b cameras with Techniscope gates (gathering dust in rental houses etc) and shoot fine grain 35mm stock as 2-perf frames.  Once we convinced the local telecine folks to get a Techni gate for their equipment we were able to shoot very tasty hi rez widescreen images pretty cheap--the film roll is twice as long in 2-perf!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...