''To The Moon and Beyond'' is a special motion picture produced for and shown at the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair. It depicted traveling from Earth out to an overall view of the universe and back again, zooming down to the atomic scale. It was filmed in a

Cinerama Cinerama is a widescreen process that originally projected images simultaneously from three synchronized 35mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen, subtending 146° of arc. The trademarked process was marketed by the Cinerama corporati ...

process using a camera with a single

fisheye lens A fisheye lens is an ultra wide-angle lens that produces strong visual distortion intended to create a wide panoramic or hemispherical image. Fisheye lenses achieve extremely wide angles of view, well beyond any rectilinear lens. Instead of p ...

and projected onto a dome screen.

Description

The film was made in a format called "The New CINERAMA - 360 Process" It was shown in a 96-foot-high "Moon Dome" that was part of Transportation and Travel building (Pavilion No. 123) in the Transportation section of the Fair and was presented by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. The film was narrated by Rod Serling.

Production

The film was created using Cinerama 360° - a process that recorded on

70mm film 70 mm film (or 65 mm film) is a wide high-resolution film gauge for motion picture photography, with a negative area nearly 3.5 times as large as the standard 35 mm motion picture film format. As used in cameras, the film is wid ...

at 18 fps using a fish-eye

wide angle lens In photography and cinematography, a wide-angle lens refers to a lens whose focal length is substantially smaller than the focal length of a normal lens for a given film plane. This type of lens allows more of the scene to be included in the ph ...

. It was projected in a domed theater using a similar wide angle projector. The film was made by Graphic Films Corporation, a company run by former

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

animator

Lester Novros Lester Novros (January 27, 1909 – September 10, 2000) was an American artist, animator, and teacher. Early life Lester Novros was born in Passaic, New Jersey on January 27, 1909. Novros studied painting at the National Academy of Design in ...

who had been making technical films for NASA, the US Air Force, and various aerospace clients.

Influences on ''2001: A Space Odyssey''

Stanley Kubrick saw the film at the Fair and was so impressed by its

special effects Special effects (often abbreviated as SFX, F/X or simply FX) are illusions or visual tricks used in the theatre, film, television, video game, amusement park and simulator industries to simulate the imagined events in a story or virtual wo ...

and accurate depiction of scientifically based material that he hired Graphic Films as a design consultant on a film he already had in pre-production, '' 2001: A Space Odyssey''. Graphic Films' Lester Novros, Con Pederson, and background artist

Douglas Trumbull Douglas Hunt Trumbull (; April 8, 1942 – February 7, 2022) was an American film director and innovative visual effects supervisor. He pioneered methods in special effects and created scenes for '' 2001: A Space Odyssey'', ''Close Encounters ...

would air-mail research based concept sketches and notes covering the mechanics and physics of space travel to Kubrick in England during pre-production. They would go on to create storyboards for a portion of the space flight sequences seen in the film. Trumbull would eventually leave Graphic Films to become a special effects supervisor on ''2001''.

References

{{Authority control World's fair films 1964 films 1964 documentary films 1964 New York World's Fair Films scored by Gerald Fried