Friday 13 July 2007

Observations from the Dark Side

Words of wisdom from the booth

Oh the joys of silent movies.

Dismantling projectors and modifying the internals to accomodate the full silent frame, filing out old aperture plates to try and match up, picking through the spare lenses to find the nearest size.... Pity the poor guy in 2050 who's going to have to try the same exercise on a 50 year old digital format, which will of course be proprietary, undocumented, and encrypted to hell and back. At least after a 100 years practice with film everyone has pretty much agreed on standard formats. Plus of course the greasy thumbprint test. I'll put a greasy thumbprint on one frame of a film, you put a greasy thumbprint on your Blu-Ray disc, and we'll see who's worried most at showtime.

By 2050 we'll still have projectionists operating machines that are older than they are, probably some of the same machines running today, while all the current DLP kit will have been mouldering away in a landfill for years.

And don't forget that any decent engineering shop could build a 35mm projector from a set of drawings.

1 comment:

The Kid In The Front Row said...

haha, i've never thought about this. interesting!