Our Beautiful Game.

"Our Beautiful Game" National Football Museum from Centre Screen Productions on Vimeo.

Film "Our Beautiful Game" was created to feature on a massive 180 degree screen at the National Football Museum in Manchester which is now housed in the old Urbis building. As the producer Lucy Faye Dawson explains on her website, it was "shot at 4K resolution on the RedCam, the film is projected at a huge scale in the museum's dedicated cinema and together with Bent Ear's full 7.1 surround audio mix, it works to completely immerse the audience in the world of football."

Like Cinemarama which was equally designed to be projected in a circular space, watching this on a flat screen on offers a partial indication of what the experience must be like though unlike Cinerama it has less of the bendy line syndrome due to the original photography compensating for the curvature of the screen, though the slight crooked nature of some of the goal posts shows it hasn't been eliminated completely.

The ratio works well for the subject matter.  Those goal posts fit just within the centre of the shot while allowing for the sides of the image to still show foreground play and background landscape, of allowing action scenes to include both a goal and the crowds reaction unhampered in the same shot. The shots of the two kids in what looks like Everton Park are gorgeous.  Perhaps all Cinerama needed was time and better technology.

Mostly it's poignant and nostalgic and even manages to resonate with someone like me whose interest in football ended with Everton's loss to Manchester United in the 1985 FA Cup final with its subsequent hours of tears and heartache and tweenage vows of never again.  Football was mostly killed for me that day.  I was eleven.  This rather makes me wonder what I've been missing.  Too late now, though.