Graeme Ferguson, Filmmaker Who Helped Create Imax, Dies at 91

Graeme Ferguson, a Canadian documentarian who cocreated Imax, the panoramic cinema experience that immerses audiences into movies, and was the chief creative force of the company for years, died on May 8 at his home in Lake of Bays, Ontario. He was 91.

His son, Munro Ferguson, said the cause was cancer.

In the 1960s, Mr. Ferguson was making a name for himself as a young cinematographer known for working in the cinéma vérité style, and he was asked to direct a documentary about the Arctic and Antarctic for Expo 67, a world’s fair in Montreal. He traveled for a year filming the movie, which also included footage of Inuit life and the aurora borealis.

The documentary, “Polar Life,” was screened with an immersive theater configuration: Audiences sat on a rotating turntable as the movie played on a panorama of 11 fixed screens. The experience was a hit. Another movie at Expo 67 that similarly used multiple screens, “In the Labyrinth,” was directed by Roman Kroitor, who was Mr. Ferguson’s brother-in-law. Soon, the two men had a vision.

“We asked each other, wouldn’t it be better to have had or been able to have a single, large-format projector filling a large screen?” Mr. Ferguson told Take One, a Canadian film magazine, in 1997. “Obviously the next step was to have a large film format, larger than anything that had ever been done.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/business/graeme-ferguson-dead.html