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Author Topic: Need ad ideas for theatre upgrade - help! Robert E. Allen Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1078 From: Checotah, Oklahoma Registered: Jul 2002 posted 04-29-2003 02:35 PM                     Ray: Along with high ticket and concession prices one of the most common complaints about today's theatres had been sound that is too loud. You may want to think twice about promoting loud sound unless you intend to alienate mature and hearing impared movie-goers. Believe it or not, those who have a partial hearing loss are bothered more by loud sound than those with normal hearing.  |  IP: Logged Manny Knowles "What are these things and WHY are they BLUE???" Posts: 4247 From: Bloomington, IN, USA Registered: Feb 2002 posted 04-29-2003 02:37 PM                     I like the "reloaded" tag line best for the unveiling. After that, you could use the one that we use down here: "Loud & Clear"  |  IP: Logged Robert E. Allen Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1078 From: Checotah, Oklahoma Registered: Jul 2002 posted 04-29-2003 02:44 PM                     Ray: P.S. I have chosen a tag line for my project that will run in every ad: "If it's playing everywhere it's not playing here". (I forget where I stole it from) The thought behind it is I will be doing some creative booking and my own promotion rather than allowing the distributors to dictate to me what will be shown and when. Of course I can get away with that in a rural town.  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 04-29-2003 03:27 PM                     Robert, that's a great tagline for a rural theater. Ray, what is the age of your audience? Obviously a movie like the Matrix the older crowd won't give a flip about seeing and your younger audience will expect it to be turned up. This doesn't discount Robert and Gerard's warnings though. Assuming your system is set up and calibrated properly, you should be able to run 85db / fader 7 and even the senior citizens won't feel pain in their ears. It has more to do with the quality of the sound than actual volume when pain and discomfort comes into play.  |  IP: Logged David Favel Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 764 From: Ashburton, New Zealand Registered: Feb 2002 posted 04-29-2003 06:46 PM                     All in all a 2 pronged attack is needed. For the matrix, sound is all important so play it loud. The typical Matrix customers will appreciate it. Then when Matrix is finished target the older section who don't like super duper phiggidy loud sessions. Perhaps a restored print in the restored cinema? Did I once hear that the loudest mixed movie ever was the sound of music?  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 04-29-2003 07:54 PM                     Ray, it seems like you are installing a decent speaker upgrade. But are you installing a digital sound format to go with it? Five channels of cinema processor amplification is not going go as far if you are feeding it a Dolby A or SR optical track. The system upgrade will be harder to promote, especially in this day where DVD and 5.1 home theater are very commonplace things. People will be more a little more apt to recognize a new sound format if you put some brand name recognition to it. Aside from the big sound quality improvement of digital, you get more credible brand names to promote. Dolby, DTS and Sony all have one-sheet posters to promote their digital surround formats. You can get sound format symbols for changeable copy marquees from Wagner Zip Change and Gemini. Sign guys like myself can make larger customized word panels with bigger logos than what Wagner can provide. The surround sound format trailers are probably the best item to promote your sound system as being "state-of-the-art" --or to put it more accurately in this age of DVD: "up to snuff." At any rate, your advertising in-theater is probably the most important point. For newspaper advertising, again, the best thing to get across the advanced nature of your sound system is to be able to attach some kind of brand name to it. If it is equipped with DTS or DD or certified THX, you'll go farther with it than using a generic "stereo surround" tag. And even there, if you use the "stereo surround" tag, many customers will expect digital surround sound when seeing the term in ads. I don't know if Brad still has a copy of a big newspaper ad I put together a couple years ago for the Carmike in my town. The theater ran a big ad when it installed its 8th DTS system to become an all-DTS site. I made the DTS, Digital Experience and THX brand names all very important parts of the design. Maybe he could post it in here or something (I don't want to load it up on this server twice). On the subject of loudness, I like movies loud but loud in a good way. Crystal clear digital surround with deep lows is great. Things like explosions with low frequency sound being loud is really cool. It doesn't hurt your ears. If a sound designer mixes in a gunshot with high frequency audio ringing over 108db, then that's painful and bullshit to pull on an audience. Most film soundtracks can be played at reference levels without any threat to an audience's hearing. Some movies are mixed louder than others, which makes it important to screen movies in advance so you'll know if it really is too damned loud. "Goldeneye" is one film I judged to be louder than normal. I think some of the loudness complaints are coming from folks who just don't like wide dynamic range in an audio track. Their hearing is not hurt, but they get startled by some scenes and it pisses them off. So they complain about loudness and threats to health and stuff. Sorry, but an explosion must be more dynamic than a person's speaking voice. And Brad is right, most people who dislike loud movies usually dislike big action / sci-fi movies anyway. So play "The Matrix" loud. Just be careful about playing the analog trailers on the front of the movie loud. That's the loudness I really hate. That's crap loud.  |  IP: Logged Ray Bernardi Expert Film Handler Posts: 120 From: Antrim, NH, USA Registered: Feb 2003 posted 04-30-2003 05:30 PM                     Thanks everybody for all the great input and ideas. This forum has been such a valuable resource for me, I just can't even begin to tell you how much I've learned here. I also can't begin to tell you all how much I appreciate your taking the time to respond and offer such great advice. I am taking pictures of the theatre tomorrow and will post them asap. I am taking the advice on being careful about billing it as loud. The idea of the "talkies speaking with authority" is great. I'm going to use that if you don't mind Randy. I am being interviewed by the three local papers this week. I'm taking the advice given and i will be very careful about the "loud" aspect. I plan to say we are not going for volume, that we are going for quality. Deep, rich crystal clear sound is what we are shooting for, or as close to it as we can get on our limited budget. I'm also going to mention that we will let the sound system "out to play" during our "late and loud" shows when the movie we have seems fitting. We are going to do shows like Rocky Horror, Pink Floyd The Wall etc. as midnight runs on Fridays and Saturdays and see if we can't generate a following of late nighters. I also plan to bring Chicago back for a weeks return run on the new system. We sold that out three weeks in a row, I bet we could do it again for a week. As I write this, my garage is filled to the gills with sound gear. The speakers arrived yesterday and I must say I'm impressed. I can't imagine what the big brothers to these things must be like! Remember, I'm a little theatre so I scaled this upgrade for the room. These are actually low end JBLs, (3622s, 3310s and 3635s) not the big monsters, but I don't need the big monsters in my hall either. This is going to be a drastic improvement. There will be no doubt that an upgrade has been done. I'll keep you posted as to how it goes. It's getting close and I'm getting nervous. HEY! Airborne just showed up - the new screen is here!!!! Just waiting on the frame now. I'm like a kid in a candy shop....  |  IP: Logged Gerard S. Cohen Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 975 From: Forest Hills, NY, USA Registered: Sep 2001 posted 05-01-2003 05:58 PM                     quote: I'm like a kid in a candy shop.... Me too, Ray! I enjoy the vicarious excitement of each new detail you offer, as who has not fantasized setting up his own theatre? Especially after seeing the photos of renovations, installations and Brad's Screening Room? Rather than add to the booth and auditorium suggestions made, I'd like to refer to another location particularly noticed by the ladies. The cleanliness and facilities of the ladies room can have a significant effect on the willingness of your female patrons to return to your theatre. "Potty parity" is often overlooked, causing males to wait impatiently for their spouses, daughters or ladyfriends who are forced to line up in the lobby to enter the women's restroom because some cheap theatre builder and his architect skimped on providing adequate facilities for females. At my last theatre the women would commandeer the mens' room on occassion rather than suffer the indignity of waiting in the lobby. [This is most egregious in some of the old 19th C. Broadway stage theaters,built in the Victorian era when women were not expected to demand parity in public facilities.] In NYC, new places of public accommodation have solved the problem, and even added fold-down diaper-changing tables to both Men's and Ladies' restrooms.  |  IP: Logged Mike Olpin Chop Chop! Posts: 1852 From: Dallas, TX Registered: Jan 2002 posted 05-03-2003 02:23 AM                     Awwww nutbunnies! I wish I had seen this post sooner. I love doing this sort of thing. Anyway, here's what I would have writen:  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 05-03-2003 03:12 AM                     To add to Gerard's point above, in addition to making sure you have an appropriate quantity of women's facilities, make sure to put "privacy walls" between the men's urinals. Too many guys can't do their business without a certain degree of privacy and they will seek the stalls instead to obtain that privacy. This ties up the stalls for those who have "serious business" to attend to and most men are too lazy to lift the seat. (And you know how accurate the typical guy's aim really is.) It will make your restrooms more efficient and cleaner as a whole. Getting more back to the subject, Bobby is right, if you want to impress your audience, you NEED to have some flavor of digital. Personally I prefer Dolby Digital because there are no discs to come in broken, scratched or damaged in some other way and it is on EVERY print. Plus their logo trailers are great! (Dts doesn't really have a good logo.) If you are a second run house, you may prefer to go with dts and take your chances on disc availability as dts can track through print defects better. Did you at least get SR cards for your Ultra stereo processor? If you didn't, you have no idea what you are missing even in the analog track. Playing back SR tracks in "stereo" or "Dolby A" noise reduction is just bad sound no matter how great the rest of your system is. Bobby, your ad is archived somewhere on a thread here.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 05-03-2003 02:50 PM                     I couldn't find the original ad after a bunch of seaches, but I made a reduced size version to post here. A bunch of the lettering is too small to read here since the ad was designed for a large newspaper ad. Anyway, the point of showing it is the example of what brand name advertising will do in promoting a theater's sound systems. Ray, since you run an independent theater, I agree with Brad's recommendation of installing a Dolby Digital processor. I'm a big DTS fan, but have to acknowledge the difficulties independent theaters have in getting DTS discs. The DD track is right there on the print and since you are showing first run prints the track should perform well. DD reliability is quite a bit better than SDDS. Lately SDDS has been getting dropped from various releases.  |  IP: Logged Randy Stankey Film God Posts: 6539 From: Erie, Pennsylvania Registered: Jun 99 posted 05-04-2003 10:09 AM                     I like Theater Reloaded and I like Late & Loud. If you have a special show that's MEANT to be loud and you advertise/sign it as such people shouldn't complain because they ASKED for it! DO have all your ushers dressed up like "Agents" in dark suits and glasses! Oh, and if you can find one of those funky audio test tracks that has lots of panning in it you could have a "last man standing contest"! Back in the 80's when CDs were first becomming popular, I remember they used to put out CDs with lots of effects and left/right panning. When you listened to them at high volume, or through headphones, you would get dizzy. Us teenagers all thought it was cool! You could find a film with lots of effects like that. (Something like a roller coaster ride) Turn it up and have the contestants stand in the front row of seats. Turn the lights down. Turn the sound UP and let her rip... Last one still standing gets the prize!  |  IP: Logged

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