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Topic: Who's going to Bradford?
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 03-20-2009 03:05 PM
Well, I'm in Bradford; arrived yesterday afternoon. I thought I might go to 'The King and I' yesterday, but I really didn't feel well enough to go out in the evening, so I went to bed.
Saw 'This is Cinerama' and 'Faubourg 36' today. Faubourg looked fantastic in a 70mm blow-up. How did this film manage to get a 70mm release, albeit a very limited one, when so few other films do? The subtitles were done in Powerpoint and and played from a laptop by a French-speaking member of National Media Museum Staff sitting in the auditorium. Full marks for that, it wouldn't be practical for an extended run, but for a single show it worked very well.
I'm going to five events/screenings tomorrow; 'Cinerama Ventures', 'How the West was Won', 'The Bible', 'At the Cutting Edge: Digital Cinema' and 'West Side Story'. If anybody is at any of these please come and say 'Hello'. I would be particulaly interested to hear what people think of the digital presentation of 'How the West was Won'.
I haven't decided about Sunday yet, it will depend on how I'm feeling, and I will not be going to anything on Monday; I'm doing other things that day. On Tuesday I return home.
[ 03-21-2009, 04:30 AM: Message edited by: Stephen Furley ]
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 03-21-2009 04:42 AM
The official story as told before the screening yesterday was that a subtitle file exists and a single 35mm print had been made with laser etched subtitles, but no 70mm one. Whatever format the subtitle file was in it was not in whatever format DTS needs for its subtitling system. The price quoted to make a disc for the DTS system with subtitles was too high for a one-off screening, but the existing subtitle file was supplied to the museum. The text from this was copied into a very large Powerpoint presentation, and the French-speaking member of staff with the laptop followed the dialogue in the film, and brought up each subtitle at the correct moment. There was a bit of a problem for the first minute or so where one line of pixels from the text stretched across the screen, almost as if the text was written in wet ink, and somebody had dragged a stylus through it. I don't know whether the problem was with the laptop, the Cine-IPM 2000, or the digital projector, but whatever it was, it was fixed quite quickly. Quite a lot of work involved, but much cheaper than making a subtitled 70mm print, or even a subtitled DTS disc, for just a one-off screening.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 03-23-2009 05:51 AM
The Widescreen Weekend continues today, but I attended my lt screening yesterday afternoon. The full list of ones I saw was:
This is Cinerama.
Faubourg 36.
Cinerama Ventures (Including the first 18 minutes of Cinerama's Russian Adventure.
How the West was Won.
The Bible...in the Beginning.
At the Cutting Edge: Digital Cinema.
West Side Story.
This is New Zealand.
Cineramacana (Including the British premiere of the new 65mm short 'Tanakh Bibelen Al-Quran).
Carousel.
Just a few quick thoughts about a few of these:
Fauboug 36 was one of the best looking blow-ups that I have seen. How did they manage to get one made for this film, and why do so few others (None in recent years that I'm aware of)? And full marks to the NMM staff for their subtitling effort.
Cinerama's Russian Adventure was badly faded, but interisting. During the screening it suddenly occurred to me that on that very day 35 years previously I had been in Moscow; we flew out to Russia on the 15th, and spent four days in Leningrad and then three in Moscow. While we were there we were taken to see the 360 degree circular cinema, and I think this may well have been 35 years to the very day before. I well remember the Metro (Subway), and it was still 5k to use it all those years later when I was there. No inflation in those days; I wonder what i costs today?
How the West Was Won - in digital, was well received. They've done a remarkable job of hiding the joins; I really hate these, and the mis-matched grading between panels. It really was just about impossible to see that it wasn't one continuouous image most of the time. Keeping focus across the curved screen was also less of an issue than I thought it might have been. There were times when I thought that the centre of the image looked just slightly soft; maybe they had to shift the focus slightly to keep the edges acceptably sharp.
It wasn't perfect, I think it could have done with a bit more light on the screen, but the projector was being used on a much larger screen than it normally is. A step up in lamp size would be worthwhile if this was a regular presentation. There was some distortion and cropping of the image; the distortion wasn't too noticeable most of the time, but it was there. For example, early in the film, where Linus sits down to eat with the family, the young boys's head, towards the bottom right corner of the screen was clearly distorted. The distortion and cropping was most noticeable during the opening titles, when the lines of text were clearly curved downwards towards the centre, and worse, were badly cropped at the bottom of the screen. I suppose that if this hadn't been the case then the image would not have filled the screen to the bottom corners, but it would not be acceptable for a 'normal' screening. If you were making a new film you could allow for this, they had to allow for worse problems than this when originally filming in the three-strip process, but it is a problem when converting an existing film never intended to be shown this way. The image also still had a somewhat 'digital' look to it, and I'm still not totally convinced that it wouldn't have looked better with more pixels on the screen.
One of the problems with restoring any of the three-strip films is that there are so few places where you can show them, three in the World open to the public I believe, and even at these three-strip screenings are infrequent. It does strike me that it would be possible to take the digital version on tour; there are plenty theatres where the stage would be large enough to errect a portable curved screen; some of these would have projection rooms, even if long disused, which could be used, the Domminion Tottenham Court Road in London, where a new, lower projection room was built for Todd-AO, is one example which comes to mind. The Domminion hasn't shown film for many years, but I believe the 'new' projection room still exists. Even where no projection room exists, or the rake from it is too steep, it may be possible to set up a digital projector elsewhere in the theatre on a temporary basis; it would certainly be easier than installing a conventional Cinerama setup. If this was done you might be able to show the films to enough people to justify the cost of the restoration.
The Bible...in the Beginning was disappointing; this wasthe first time that I have seen D-150, I have seen Patton, but only in 35mm on a flat screen. The image was so dark that it was almost impossible to see what was happening for much of the time. I also didn't really like the film itself.
At the Cutting Edge: Digital Cinema included a demonstration of the Dolby 3-D process, the first time that I have seen it. It's probably the best of the 3-D pocesses that I've seen so far, though I'm still not really clear exactly how it works. Unlike polarised systems it doesn't require a silver screen, and you don't start seeing double if you tilt your head slightly. Personally, I still find 3-D quite difficult to watch, ok for a short subject, but I'd rather not atch a long feature that way.
West Side Story Looked ok, but I think the 35mm reduction I saw in London a few years ago, printed on the new Eastman print stock, looked better. This was shown on the Cinerama screen, and I think it would have been better on the flat one.
This is New Zealand is a three panel film made to be shown at Expo-70. It has recently been restored printed in single-strip 35mm anamorphic form, and looked very good. It's shown on a flat screen, with different images on the three panels most of the time, but from time to time a single image will span two, or all three, panels; not unlike Polyvision, 40 years earlier. It looked very good, even in the reduced form.
Tanakh Bibelen Al-Quran is a very unusual film. It features the entire content of all three books, with each pair of pages held for three frames, and runs for something over four minutes it total. Of course you can't read the text at that speed, but you can compare the typographic style of the three books, but then you could do that with still photographs, or the books themselves. To be honest, I'm not sure that I see the point in it, but it's good to see somebody shooting in 65mm again, and the image quality was very good, It wouldn't have looked the same shot in 35mm, or video. An interesting film to see if you get the chance.
Carousel is a strange film. I haven't seen it for a long time, and this is obviously the first time I've seen the restored version. I assume it must have been done at 4k. The use of a large negative really does make a difference, and Cinemascope 55 is nothing if not large. It looked good, even with the negative stocks and anamorphic optics of half a century ago; it's a pity that the process didn't survive for us to see what it would have looked like using the best materials and equipment that would have been available today. The Cinemascope 55 negative really is huge; there's no provision for a sound track area, and small perforations were used, so the image area is about as large as it gould possibly be on that gauge of film. I can't remember the exact deminsions, but I think when I woked it out a few years ago it as something like 40% bigger, in area, than a Todd-AO frame. You can't really compare in linear terms because of the different aspect ratio.
It was said that some existing 35mm projectors could have been converted to work with the proposed, but never used, 6-perf reduction print format, which was not the case with Todd-AO. What that would have looked like, with modern equipment and materials, We will never know.
I'm off back to London tomorrow, pleased to meet Ben Wales and Brian Guckian during the weekend. Also, the digital cinema presentation was given by Darren Briggs, who also posts here occasionally.
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