Melted Film and a Dramatic Cross-Country Drive: How One Filmmaker Captured a Total Solar Eclipse for IMAX 70MM

‘Eclipse’ screening Gus Bendinelli

At 12 pm on Wednesday afternoon at Universal CityWalk theater, the massive auditorium that handles IMAX 70mm screenings was nearly at capacity. The audience wasn’t there for the current box office champ, Project Hail Mary, or a re-release of Ryan Coogler’s Oscar-winning Sinners. Instead, they had assembled for an independently made short film.

Gus Bendinelli, a career cinematographer with a side passion for rare celestial events, is behind Eclipse, a real-time rendering of the 2024 total solar eclipse, shot for IMAX 70 mm projection.

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“I feel crazy saying that I directed this,” jokes Bendinelli after Wednesday’s screening. “I got there and I rolled. I wasn’t like, ‘Alright, let’s do it again!’”

But it was the getting there that was really the hard part. It took two years, some very rare camera equipment and a couple thousand miles worth of driving before Bendinelli was able to screen his short film, where the star is, well, a star.

Bendinelli’s journey to capture a total solar eclipse began in January 2024. He’d have just a few months to prepare, or miss his window, as April 2024’s eclipse would be the last above the United States for 20 years.

While solar eclipses, partial and total, have been captured on film, physical and digital, many times, these videos include the application of a solar filter on top of the camera’s lens.

The downside of using a solar filter? The sun appears in an unnatural orange hue (think: the color the sun appears to the human eye when using solar eclipse glasses). Shooting with a filter also requires its manual removal during totality — or, when the sun is completely hidden by the moon — meaning a hand must enter the frame and interrupt the shot. The upside to a filter is that the sun won’t physically melt your film stock and, if you are intrepid and/or ignorant enough to look through the camera’s viewfinder, possibly your eyeball.

“I really wanted to find a way to shoot a closeup of the eclipse without having to remove a filter during the shot, allowing you to just watch [the eclipse] unfold in real time without any manipulation,” explains Bendinelli.

To start with, Bendinelli gained access to two of the six known Mitchell-Fries AP 65 cameras, which have the capacity to shoot 65-millimeter film stock, famously used in cinematic epics like Lawrence of Arabia and, more auspiciously for his purposes, 2001: Space Odyssey.

Next up was the lens, a rare 800mm Pentax that he found on eBay from a seller in Japan. Measuring over two feet long, the lens had a Goldilocks quality: the right focal length and aperture that would allow the director to get the entirety of the sun in the frame, while still physically fitting the Mitchell-Fries camera.

Bendinelli started to test his assembled rig, which also included a specially-built IMAX adapter, roughly one month before the eclipse with camera tech Ian Mueller. Bendinelli quickly realized that pointing his camera at the sun had “a magnifying glass on an ant” quality for his film, a 65 MM film stock engineered by Kodak that incidentally was left over from Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer shoot.

While burn holes appeared on the film as the camera was warming up, once the film magazine was moving fast enough through the camera, at the requisite 24 frames per second, the sun never stayed on the film long enough to leave any marks. “Running these cameras is a bit like getting a car up to speed,” he explains.

Melted 65 mm (L) and Mitchell-Fries AP 65 camera with Pentax lens (R) Gus Bendinelli (2)

With the camera, lens and film largely troubleshot, Bendinelli turned his attention towards the biggest factor completely out of his control: The weather.

The 2024 solar eclipse’s path of totality — the areas where the sun would be completely covered by the moon as they are visible from Earth — ran in a thin strip from Texas to Maine. “Any eclipse chaser will tell you that their greatest fear is cloud cover,” says Bendinelli. After dabbling in amateur meteorology, studying the historical weather on April 8 for the past several decades across the south and northeast, he and Mueller, set off towards Texas and Arkansas, two areas that seemed most likely to have the best chance at clear skies.

Three days into his road trip, with 15 hours of driving per day, and five days before the eclipse, they were in Joplin, Missouri. Unfortunately, right behind was an eastward-moving storm system. So they continued driving and, on day six of their trip, the day before the eclipse, he reached what was practically the end of the continental U.S. in Jackman, Maine.

Sixteen miles from the Canadian border, they found a snowy roadside stop with an unobstructed view of the sky that also overlooked a valley with a lake, all hemmed in by forested mountains. One camera was set to capture the eclipse, with the second camera trained on the landscape to show the changing light. The eight-hour day of prep included camera tests, loading in fifteen-pound magazines of film, oiling over a dozen friction points in each camera and fixing an eleventh-hour blown fuse.

In the end, after months of anticipation and work, it only took roughly seven minutes for Bendinelli to shoot the eclipse, surrounded by a few dozen fellow watchers in an otherwise quiet corner at the edge of the country.

Gus Bendinelli during the solar eclipse Gus Bendinelli

With his two film canisters stored in the minifridge of his rented camper van, Bendinelli drove back across the country. When he reached Los Angeles, even before returning home, he headed straight to FotoKem, the Burbank film lab where most of Hollywood’s large format film projects get developed.

Eclipse features a minimalist score by musician Nick Leng, but otherwise is presented as a real-time look at a singular astronomical occurrence. The shot of the sun, as it slowly and then completely disappears behind the moon, takes up the top half of the 58-foot-tall screen, while the shot of the Maine landscape, dipping from daylight to mid-day darkness and back again, sits below.

Says the director, “I really just wanted to give it this objective viewpoint, so that you could have a subjective experience with it.”

The film is a meditation as much as a movie. Staring up at a nearly six-story-tall screen, witnessing a unique planetary event, itself the product of a remarkable cosmic coincidence, unique to our place and position within the solar system, is an exceptional experience. That you can see it in a movie theater on a random Wednesday afternoon makes it all even better.

Eclipse is also a case study in light — the type of film that could only be made by a cinematographer. “I feel like a lot of times, as a cinematographer, you’re achieving someone else’s vision, and that can be really fulfilling,” says Bendinelli. “Creatively, it was really fun to do something for me.”

Eclipse’s inaugural screening, which was presented in partnership with Kodak, happened with a crowd of cinephiles, camera enthusiasts and at least one astrophysicist who flew in from Hawaii for the occasion. IMAX 70mm is a projection format often only reserved for Hollywood’s biggest directors (Nolan! Villeneuve! Coogler!). This was the first time the theater screened an independently made project developed for the premium format.

It’s this type of in-person experience that Bendinelli is hoping to preserve for future screenings of Eclipse. He has no plans to release the footage online. The focus is on other IMAX movie theaters, galleries, or science centers.

“My goal with this project was to try to capture the feeling of seeing a total solar eclipse in person. But what I realized after the fact is that one of the things that makes seeing it so special is being a part of a group of people who’ve gathered,” says Bendinelli. “An eclipse might be the closest thing nature has to a movie. The lights go down, and we all look up.”