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Author Topic: Bad auditoriums? Thomas Pitt Master Film Handler Posts: 266 From: Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK Registered: May 2007 posted 03-05-2008 03:31 PM                     We've had the You Suck topics in the Film Handlers Forum about bad film handlers. Now how about another topic for auditorium architects and/or maintenance staff who don't have a clue about good presentation? I'll start here with Sheffield Vue (Meadowhall) auditorium 3. Firstly, being a very small auditorium, the hard walls give a lot of echo on the sound - it varies depending on where you sit. Secondly, the centre of the screen is where the aisle between the seats is, meaning you can't sit in the centre, i.e. there are no 'best seats'! Unlike most multiplexes these days, it doesn't have any stadium seating. To prevent people in front blocking your view, the screen is mounted quite high up so you have to bend your neck upwards to watch - causing cramps after a while! Finally, and perhaps the worst aspect, a spotlight has been positioned right at the front of the auditorium above the screen. This particular spotlight is one of those that stays on throughout the entire movie, giving light so you can find your way to seats and such. Unfortunately, it also illuminates the screen, causing low contrast in dark scenes of the movie. Anyone else have horror stories of bad auditorium design? NB if there is already a topic about this somewhere, please lock this one  |  IP: Logged Brad Miller Administrator Posts: 17775 From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall) Registered: May 99 posted 03-05-2008 08:00 PM                     AMC HITS systems and the Princess II pretty much have this one nailed.  |  IP: Logged Monte L Fullmer Film God Posts: 8367 From: Nampa, Idaho, USA Registered: Nov 2004 posted 03-05-2008 08:58 PM                     How about the classic "shotgun seating?" Granted, the easiest way to add more seats in a limited space, but still annoying with patrons walking in the middle when you're still want to watch the movie.. My big rant is on one 6plex that I know where the back row seats are on the flat part of the designed floor. Thus, you sit back there, it becomes almost totally impossible to see the screen since the row in front of you begins the slope for the house-try to look through heads sitting back there ....  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 03-05-2008 09:02 PM                        My pet peeve is auditoria that have been split down the center to make two "shoebox" houses. Invariably, the seats never get re-oriented to face the screen and the angles are always odd.  |  IP: Logged Bill Enos Film God Posts: 2081 From: Richmond, Virginia, USA Registered: Apr 2000 posted 03-06-2008 08:33 PM                     The Biograph that formerly existed here was built from all leftover pieces parts. Opened in early '70s. Had a sloped floor with seats all designed for slopes other than the one they were installed on. Some tilted way back and you had to tilt your head down till your chin touched your chest, others were tilted so far forward that you felt like you were sliding off. The screen was a bit high too. I had a guy who had worked projection there work in our booth for a couple years, he had no idea about starting in frame or splicing in frame when he first started, he had been told that the frame knob was to correct that. Turned out to be very good.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 03-06-2008 08:50 PM                     It is my firm experience and belief that the number of well designed theatres in the last 40 or 50-years is in the single digit of percentages. Stadium seating pretty much poves it. Stadium seating is the answer to the problem of improperly designed sight-lines on sloped floors. Then there are the actual acoustics of the room...I don't know what voodoo some use when "designing" AUDitoriums but odds are that no acoustic engineering was done. There are "Theatre Architects" that seem to be able to put out cookie-cutter type cinemas (everything seems to be boiler plated) but I can't remember the last time I met one that really knew how to design a proper movie theatre in that it looked good, sounded good (and I don't mean needing a whole bunch of EQ) and otherwise performed well. THX did raise the awareness of cinema design for acoustics but lets face it...that costs money and exhibitors just don't do that unless they can see a direct correlation on a spread sheet to dollars out and dollars in. Improving the movie experience (as a whole) doesn't fit on a spreadsheet so well. Yet better cinemas, by in large do better than the inferior ones though there exceptions to that rule but it isn't too common. The number of cinemas I tolerate going to in this area are quite small indeed.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 03-06-2008 08:59 PM                     See my Snakes on a Plane movie review, which also offers scathing criticism of the auditorium design. This particular room, in the Cinemark Carefree Circle multiplex in Colorado Springs, had one of the worst projection port arrangements to the screen I've ever seen in a movie theater. The port is considerably offset to the left and place very high -at least a good 10' to 15' above the highest back row of the theater. The projector has to shoot down to the screen at a severe angle and off center. The projected results are laughably terrible. I can only guess this port placement is due to the auditorium being located fairly close to the IMAX theater on the north end of the complex. If that's true, then convenience in booth design trumped having an auditorium with any ability to feature a correctly projected image.  |  IP: Logged Sean McKinnon Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1712 From: Peabody Massachusetts Registered: Sep 2000 posted 03-08-2008 10:50 AM                        Loews used to have a theatre in Boston in the Copley Square Mall (Scott will know all about this one ) The auditoriums (which were all pretty small) sloped UP towards the screen??? It was painful to watch a movie in there which is too bad because it had some good projection equipment (Cinemacanica and Kinoton). This theatre is now either a restaurant or a cothing store.  |  IP: Logged Frank Angel Film God Posts: 5305 From: Brooklyn NY USA Registered: Dec 1999 posted 03-08-2008 12:15 PM                        A theatre here which shall go nameless was designed by some very famous Japanese architect. The museum (ooops) seems to drool at the mention of his name and they are gushingly proud that they've got a space designed by this famous guy. Yes, it is an interesting room with an undulating ceiling and wooden panel walls. Problem is, this guy never designed a room for CINEMA before. Instead of curtains in front of the screen, he thought it would be a great idea to have huge, wooden panels on tracks that would act as curtains, only MUCH heavier and much slower to open and close than curtains. If you started the first frame of the film and pushed the OPEN button, you'd be 2 minutes into the film while these huge, lumbering panels finished opening. Worse that this is the fact that the undulating ceiling dips right into the line of sight of the projectionist view of the upper right hand corner of the screen....that's right -- it obscures the change-over cue position (in a change-over booth!). You have to bend down considerably to see the cues. Next, he thought it would be very sexy to have a booth WINDOW across the entire expanse of the front booth wall so people could see all the high-tech blinking lights and make fun of the projectionist. So you have to work only with little winky pilot lights; you can't have the overhead booth lights on during a show. And you have to talk in hushed tones because this window wall doesn't isolate booth sound from the theatre. There is a REASON 99% of projection booths use PORTS instead of wall-to-wall windows. AND, the ceiling and walls, other than the wood panels, are painted WHITE. I would say 80% of the surface area in the room is white. White walls = no blacks on the screen and awful screen contrast. And for a new build...well, now 8 years old anyway, the screen size is unimpressive. Architecturally there was much more room for a bigger screen that would have been more appropriate to the space, but I actually think the decision was made for a smaller, ho-hum size screen so that he could get these massive wood panels in front of it to work -- larger and you would need a Mack truck motor to move them. Seems the motors and pulley system for them was custom designed. The things worked for about 6 months and then ground to a halt. They are so massive that the switch to open or close them that they designed the switch to be a deadman-type switch -- you have to hold it for the whole 2+ minutes it takes for them to open or close, the reason being that they could crush someone if he/she happen to get caught between them when they were closing. As is the case with many first-time ideas, they don't have experience testing behind them -- what they didn't think of here is that, yes, it's a deadman switch so the operator could see someone's bones being crushed as the panels closed and he would be able to let go of the switch. Problem is, the switch is on a the wall just PAST the place where the operator could actually see the stage and panels. He would only let go of the switch if he heard someone screaming that they were being crushed. These panels jammed or otherwise stopped working completely so many times that the original installing company who were called over to service them, finally gave up and won't return calls; now the panels have to be pushed out of the way by a crew of 4 guys. One of the other "innovative and unique" elements of this design was the fact that the PA part of the system consisted of 24 small, 8in speakers mounted in the ceiling. The idea was that for PA work (mics on stage, music playback other than cinema), this elaborate array of small speaker would be placed in such a way that they would adequately cover the entire seating area. The sound company that designed the coverage, carefully mapped out the on-axis cone of sound from each speaker so that where one cone ended the cone of the next speaker took over so everyone was sitting in an on-axis sound dispersion from a speaker above them. Problem is, the sound company was in the Midwest somewhere and the designers, well, he was in Japan. The sound installer was only given the 2D dimensions of the ceiling but was not told that the ceiling had a 3D component -- WAVES. When the speaker were mounted in these ceiling holes, they didn't aim directly downward, but pointed at various angles, ruining the carefully dispersion for even floor coverage. It was a disaster. They had to go hire another company to go back and re-aim the speaker by putting in shims -- this was done by barely skilled day laborers. I would bet that most of the speaker to this day are not actually aimed correctly. AND although there were 3 behind the screen JBLs, there were no provisions for surround sound or subbass. None. CP55 surround and subbass output channels ended in a jacks on the patchbay. As a stop gap, I patched that into the house PA so that surround came from above....it did "surround" the audience, but not exactly the way it was intended. To this day they haven't put in surround speakers because that would "ruin the aesthetic integrity" of the famous Japanese designer wood panel walls. After about 4 years of my moaning and complaining, they finally purchased a BGW powered subbass bin, but no amount of whining on my part has gotten them to "mar" the side walls. And that's just ONE theatre. I have other stories!  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 03-08-2008 03:40 PM                        Agreed with Sean--Copley was a dump. What's scary is that they did most of the press screenings up until it closed, apparently because the location was convenient for the local film critics.  |  IP: Logged Chris Slycord Film God Posts: 2986 From: 퍼항시, 경상푹도, South Korea Registered: Mar 2007 posted 03-08-2008 07:03 PM                     When Cineplex Odeon apparently took over the Kirkland Park Place Cinema in Kirkland, WA from some local guys it was essentially designed like it was some guy's basement. Truly, the theater was the basement of the stores located above it. Auditoriums had nothing marking which one was which and the doors were simply like those you would find in an office; simple black steel door. And the auditoriums were shaped like boats: high in the back, drop down in the middle, then up in the front plus the center was taken up by the aisle. Though it's since been remodeled after it got sold by Loews-Cineplex a few years ago. Now there's no more "aisle in the center" and they got seats arranged so that the dumb floor shape doesn't affect the sight views anymore.  |  IP: Logged Eric Hooper Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 532 From: Fort Worth, TX, USA Registered: May 2003 posted 03-08-2008 09:22 PM                     quote: Scott Norwood My pet peeve is auditoria that have been split down the center to make two "shoebox" houses. Invariably, the seats never get re-oriented to face the screen and the angles are always odd. LOL. See UA STONESTOWN TWIN The seats actually face the wall!  |  IP: Logged Stephen Furley Film God Posts: 3059 From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England Registered: May 2002 posted 03-09-2008 01:12 AM                     quote: Frank Angel Instead of curtains in front of the screen, he thought it would be a great idea to have huge, wooden panels on tracks that would act as curtains, only MUCH heavier and much slower to open and close than curtains. If you started the first frame of the film and pushed the OPEN button, you'd be 2 minutes into the film while these huge, lumbering panels finished opening. This sounds rather similar to what the NFT in London had for many years; they were a familiar sight in photographs of on-stage interviews etc. but this is the only picture I can find of them at the moment: web page They were out of use for several years before eventually being replaced by conventional curtains a few years ago. They opened quite quickly, but were rather noisy.  |  IP: Logged Sean McKinnon Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1712 From: Peabody Massachusetts Registered: Sep 2000 posted 03-09-2008 09:55 AM                        In this part of the country we had a lot of houses that were very long and narrow with center aisle seating. These houses were so awful, small screens and a very long throw made it so that if you sat in the back it looked smaller than your home T.V. When surround came out most of these houses that were upgraded did not have enough speakers to cover the long length of the room. Thankfully almost all of these auditoria are gone now.  |  IP: Logged Tom Mundell Expert Film Handler Posts: 120 From: Silver Spring, MD, USA Registered: Nov 2007 posted 03-09-2008 04:35 PM                        quote: Brad Miller AMC HITS systems I agree with that one! I've been in plenty of bad auditoriums, but those style AMC rooms are probably my least favorite.  |  IP: Logged

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