Makeup!

Another day of hard graft (boo) followed by a trip to the Bradford Photographic Museum IMAX cinema to see "The Matrix Reloaded" on the very big screen (yay). If you have not seen an IMAX film they are very impressive. You sit about twenty feet from a screen the size of a five storey building. The images are projected using special film which is so large (each frame of the film is around the size of a postcard, rather than the usual postage stamp negatives in ordinary films) that it has to be flipped through the projector rather than pulled. There are a whole bunch of speakers inside the screen to give you a really powerful sound and the total effect is amazing. Up until now they have used IMAX for specially shot films but now some Hollywood blockbusters have been given the treatment. It is kind of expensive apparently, with all kinds of digital trickery being needed to make the images fit on the screen and retain quality, but the effect is well worth it.

The only real problem is that the screen is so big, and fills so much of your field of view, that you can't easily take in the very fast moving action. Also, the somewhat pockmarked face of Morpheus in extreme close up comes out looking like the surface of the moon. If nothing else this film shows the wonderful job that the makeup department did. And the chase scene is absolutely amazing.