Across the Sea of Time was created with the IMAX Solido 3D camera system, with a soundtrack shaped for the revolutionary Personal Sound Environment (PSE). The project was filmed across Manhattan, and on Coney and Ellis Islands.

The past/present concept for Across the Sea of Time was born when director/producer Stephen Low, who also directed the highly acclaimed The Last Buffalo (which opened the Sony IMAX Theatre at Sony Theatres Lincoln Square in New York City in November 1994) did IMAX 3D test from a set of antique, “stereoview” photographs owned by the Museum of Photography at the University of California. These black-and-white 3D shots depicted New York City at the turn-of-the-century (19th-20th) and, while Low, and his father Colin (who had made the very first IMAX 3D film in 1986), had long been experimenting with the use of stills in IMAX 2D, their experiment yielded something remarkable. These images had great fidelity and a powerful realism that could bring the past alive.

Because the museum possessed the original glass plate negatives, the photographs could be transferred to the IMAX format in 3D with enormous fidelity. As Low describes it, “these tiny, little images intended to be looked at through a small stereopticon, and never intended to be blown up, were suddenly life-size. Pictures of these long-ago dead people were suddenly very, very poignant and sad.”