projectionists

I've starting projecting movies one day a week. The training was about 6 weeks and I still don't have it down. We work with 2 projectors (no platter) and a change over usually after the 3rd or 4th reel. I was showing Valkyrie tonight. After the changeover, I had timecodes at the top of the screen I couldn't make go away. I checked whether the aperture plate was right (it was flat, not scope). I just couldn't manage to frame the film right. If I moved it up to get the numbers away, the bottom of the picture was too far up on the screen.

Any of you projectionists?

jeeze maria, you really do a lot of cool stuff, huh???

Sounds needlessly complicated. Bring on technology and hasten the obsolescence of this profession and its associated labour union.

i have projected exactly once (for practice) but i will probably be getting trained in it more in-depth within the next year or so. kinda stoked but yeah it seems a bit overwhelming to novices like me

i have no reason to learn this, yet i really want to

Yes, I am a projectionist (at school). Hi

What city do you project in, Maria? It's important that there are good projectionists in the world.

union projectionists (at least in chicago) are some of the most hilarious dudes in all the world imo

I thought most of multiplexes proj'd films on one big mega-reel now?

Make sure you have the projector bulb at the proper brightness or Roger Ebert will track you down and yell at you.

or someone who pays $10-12.

one of my chicago bros is a projectionist at the theater where ebert screens movies, no joke

is he union? prob not. the unions pretty much got forced out of the theaters 7-8 years back. they do trade shows/ events/ meetings and shit now.

Nah, he's part time, nights and weekends. Sounds like a great place to work, though, what with meeting random famous people and getting paid pretty well too. Also: movie parties on nights when the screening room is not in use (hooking a wii up was impossible unfortch).

my cousin's friend was an assistant manager at a dollar theater when i was like 18-- we had a party in the theater xmas nite the year wizard of oz got re-released and did the pink floyd dark side thing.

i was an imax projectionist for 7 years. i made decent money and had a lot of free time but spending 10 hours a day in a dark room pretty much by yourself starts to wear.

the death of projection as a profession bothers me. every time i go to the AMC or whatever some minimum wage high school kid fucks up the masking or has spliced the print together with his eyes closed or let it get filthy and scratched after like a week... the new orleans projectionists' union has been gone for decades.

aside from small theaters (like maria is talking about--no platters, that's awesome. should be using carbon arc too. that's the fun stuff.) 70mm stuff like imax is the last stand for people who want their movies to look good. most imax projectionists are these grizzled old-timers who talk constantly about the death of the union and how much acid they took working drive-ins in the 70s.