Filmmaker Francis Thompson paved the way for " Larger-than-life" Imax movies, with his multi-screen films.
With research into multi-screen productions, his name came up for an Academy Award winning three-screen documentary entitled " To Be Alive!" that glimpsed at the lives of children in Italy, Africa and America, which was shown at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair.
Mr. Silleck described ''To Be Alive!'' as a simple film that sought to convey the joy of life, and he said the multiscreen projection, while not a new technique, inspired the Canadian filmmakers who went on to create Imax films, the big-screen shows that seem to bring the audience into the film. [Ref: Francis Thompson, 95, Whose Films Inspired Imax, New York Times, 2003]
It was said that his film was designed to celebrate the common ground between different cultures by following how children in various parts of the world mature into adulthood. The production was shot over an 18 month period in locations across the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa.
In the screening of the production, he used three separate 18-foot screens which, unlike Cinerama that joins three screens into a single unbroken entity, they were separated by a foot of space.
The production was only available for public screening in the Golden Rondelle Theatre in Wisconsin, and occasionaly shown in retrospective tributes to co-director Alexander Hammid, and there is currently no home video or DVD Release of the production.
I think the thing that intrigued me most was the sense of social realism that this production seems to hold. Like many of my previous pieces, it's about real things that happen, however, shown in a documentary style and not an experimental film.
The production and presentation for this specific piece seemed quite a good idea, allowing the audience to watch one panel, and then the following two afterwards and be able to compare and pull a message from it. It's definitely a piece that deserves the audiences attention, and its that that I want to put into my work. To make it worth watching.
