Eugène Lourié encountered a problem when shooting the miniatures with the large-format cameras. At the higher frame rates, the mechanisms of the Super Panavision camera would overheat. According to Lourié, each night one or two of the cameras would have to be repaired. Because of this problem, he was limited to a maximum frame rate of only 72 frames per second.
After the success of Earthquake and its Sensurround process, this film was re-released in Europe in the mid 1970's (under the new title "Volcano") with the addition of Sensurround. In some areas this process was advertised as "Feelarama."
At the time this was in production, Rome was building an extension of its subway system. Some of the excavated dirt was piled on the back lot at Cinecitta. Eugène Lourié made arrangements to use the 70-foot mound of dirt as one of the miniatures of Krakatoa.
During filming, the Cinerama cameras made so much noise that they drowned out the dialogue. All of the dialogue spoken in the film was re-recorded in post-production.
In the early phases of production there was no script, but they knew what special effects sequences were needed and special effects creator Eugène Lourié shot many of the miniature sequences before the writing was complete.
Krakatoa was actually located west of Java.
The producers learned of the geographic error (Krakatoa was west of Java in the Sundra Strait) only after all of the advertising and publicity materials had been prepared. It was deemed too costly to re-do these materials, and possibly delay the release, for the sake of simple geographic accuracy.
This became one of the last features to use Todd-AO for principal photography.
Eugène Lourié:
telegrapher.