Development of integral holographic motion pictures

In 1985 Anne-Marie Christakis selected me to make the first pulse holographic feature-fiction movie. Up to that time, the process had only been used for laboratory tests. The running time for the movie was to be 1 minute 20 seconds. Apparently quite long compared with previous tests, but an extremely short time in which to tell a story. I chose the characters of Beauty and the Beast. A lot of time was spent in preparatory work: triple distilling the scenario to get it down to 80 seconds; paintings and masks, and I extracted the music from a suite I had already written in medieval style. The movie was made in 1986 in the laboratory of Professeur Smigielsky, which was located in the Franco-German Defense Research Establishment, at St. Louis in France. Prof. Smigielsky's staff operated all the equipment and Anne-Marie Christakis coordinated everything, as she had done throughout the project. As soon as we arrived at the laboratory, we were told not to look beyond a certain angle towards the laser, otherwise we could be blinded for life. With all that dangerous power however, it was only possible to illuminate a volume for the set of half a meter wide by half a meter deep by one third of a meter high. Such a set gives real meaning to the expression `cramp one's style.' The layout used was, in principle, the same as for making a simple hologram. A pulsed YAG laser was used and each pulse was synchronized with a new frame to be exposed in the camera. When the movie was finished, it was not very bright, and one had to look through a small aperture to view it.