Lentorama 2014: We're Ready for Your Closeup, Your Holiness

Day 9: The March of Todd-AO

Todd-AO was developed in the 1950s as a large film format to create movies in competition with the existing large film standard, Cinerama. Todd-AO films were shot with one camera using 70 millimeter film. The final print would also incorporate six channels of sound, giving the films a level of visual and audio quality beyond the average 35mm prints.

Several films were shot in Todd-AO, including many musical adaptations (such as Oklahoma and The Sound of Music). The larger film size required the movies be shown in theaters with appropriate equipment, and as movie theaters at the time were often single-screen, you'd have Todd-AO films playing for months at a time, so shorts were filmed in Todd-AO to run in front of the feature and provide new content.

This film is one of them, and one of the subjects was the coronation of Pope John XXIII.