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This topic comprises 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
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Author
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Topic: Who Still Has A Curtain
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Daniel Alt
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 111
From: Lakewood, OH, USA
Registered: Mar 2004
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posted 09-26-2004 10:03 PM
We project in a college auditorium. The front wall of the room looks like a solid hunk of wood, but press a button, and the wall lifts to reveal our screen. It's sort of impressive.. I always feel we ought to be playing "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (that's 2001 for you non-classical people) as it goes up.
(some pictures here)
Well, at least until this summer, when the electricians tilted the screen a bit and then tried to shut the door on it. Now the frame is bent, and we can't close the door at ALL until they fix it.
Which ruins one of our pre show traditions - hit the director with a paper airplane during announcements, and get a free popcorn. Unfortunately, we can't allow airplanes with the door up, for the obvious reason that we don't want them hitting the screen.
Sigh.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 10-05-2004 06:15 AM
quote: Daniel Alt
We project in a college auditorium. The front wall of the room looks like a solid hunk of wood, but press a button, and the wall lifts to reveal our screen. It's sort of impressive.. I always feel we ought to be playing "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (that's 2001 for you non-classical people) as it goes up.
Funny, the Brooklyn Museum has about the same thing. The cinema was designed by a big mucky-muck Japanese architect (whose name you're supposed to oooh and ahhh over when you hear it, but alas, I can't ever remember it....so much for the prestige value of a name). Given how the curators always gush over this "wood panel design," I've just always assumed that the big wooden panels which cover the screen at the proscenium were a unique design of his. Evidently not, eh? Heh Heh.
The "wood curtain" wall looks pretty nice (although not nearly as interesting as a nicely lit curtain) -- one big expanse of blond wood for the audience to stare at. The thing is, the wood panels worked for about six months and then stopped.....well, kind of stopped. You never knew if they would open fully or not when you pushed the button. Sometimes they would make this jerking motion, give out a grunt and blow the breaker. After the first couple of times of having to call other staff and go down with them to physically push these ten ton monsters open by hand in front of an audience, I just refused to activate the silly things.
Thing is, to cover the full width of the proscenium, the things had to be made of four panels, two each side. All four had to move to opposite ends of a proscenium where there wasn't enough space to hold a panel half the width of the stage. So they were constructed as quarter panels, two per side in order that they could fit off-stage. But that's the tricky part -- getting them to be flush when opened, making one seamless front wood wall, yet split and wind up on in front of the other in the off-stage wing. It required an elaborate, custom designed series of snake tracks that made twists and turns so that one panel would eventually wind up folded behind the other, parallel to it's partner in the wing; conversely, when closing, the first one must move faster than it partner so it can get in front of it and angle in, so that by the time both are in place, they are butted together with no overlap. Same on the other side.
It was a lumbering mechanical waltz, one that at its best was tentative, slow and made great moaning sounds as belts and pulleys strained in the track trying to move these huge things into place, all in what seemed like slow motion to the projectionist.
The panels themselves were made up of what looked like wood floor paneling, not a thin, light veneer. Adding to the weight of the thick wood were the unnecessarily massive metal frames that weighed plenty (three guys to move a single panel) on which the wood was anchored. The whole conglomerate did its dance....or floundering and not doing it, depending on the heat and humidity, with great hesitation.
After a chair that had been left on stage in the behemoth's path was crushed like a tin can, there was a rush to install safety mechanisms (we have children on stage all the time), which compromised the reliability factor even more. Somehow pulley tension sensors were installed so that a resistance would stop the motors. They installed a deadman's switch in the booth (you had to hold it down until the panels completed their open or close cycle). And get this -- if your fingers accidentally slipped while holding down the switch and the thing stopped mid-cycle, you couldn't just turn the switch again and keep going. You had to make the panels go all the way back in the other direction and start over again!
Even when they were working, they simply couldn't replace the functionality of a curtain, i.e., preventing the audience from seeing a naked screen. This is because you had to open these panels long before you could throw an image on the screen, they opened THAT slowly. If you tried to open them as the first frame hit the screen, you'd be halfway through the first reel before they finally came to their resting place. OK, that's an exaggeration, but they did take a good 60 seconds to fully open; useless for a curtain effect.
Now that the museum has installed an Eiki "Theatre" projector, I can hook it up to a laptop and play any of the wild visualization programs that are readily available with everyday media players like Spectrum Pro's Psychedelic or Winamp or even Windows Media Player (although I refuse to use Media Player simply because I so loath Microsoft products). The visualizations can all be activated in sync with the non-sync music (life is full of irony), and they really look way tasty on the big screen. The dancing visualizations are wonderful to use as a "light curtain" effect. It certainly is better than a naked screen.
At least the video projector is good for something.
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lol. Cinemas realy need to shape up over here. I have worked as a projectionist / usher but when the cinema comes to job advertising they aint intresed ![[Confused]](confused.gif)
lol.
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