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I'll bite. Was waiting till I had time...
Cinema projection is a relatively recent change to my career path, so it worth sharing how I ended up here, though it is perhaps somewhat traditional from an IATSE perspective, just lacking the unbroken lineage of mentorship.
I did theatre production all through High School, "Techie" as was the term for that age bracket. Enjoyed arts and sciences, especially computer sciences, and mostly survived the hell that is High School by spending the bulk of my time in the Art Room, Newspaper room, or in the scene shop after school. Art Room was the only "serious" computer lab in the school too, with decent machines that could dip their toe in the emergent 3D art sphere in 92-96. I was in the age group that played Myst and was blown away, and learned Strata Studio shortly after, other friends that had PCs focused on 3DStudioMax if they weren't absorbed in making custom level bitmaps for Wolfenstein3D. As far as theatre, lighting design was my main interest but as a senior I did also execute two set designs for HS level productions.
I spent a few HS summers working for my step mother's library and lab furniture company, as a drafting assistant, where I further honed my manual drafting and CAD skillset (granted back on original Pentium 486s... ouch, one quickly learned to not change your viewport very often!). I was so fond of that era later in life that I started collecting HP and Roland pen-plotters. Although really I had an art/photography idea I wanted them for, which I still haven't executed.
For college my interests were kinda evenly split between design fields, architecture, art, and computer science or EE. Somehow a BA in Theatre & Dance (Lighting Concentration) seemed to be a happy combination of all of the above and a comfy space to spend 4 years. I fell into the same patterns in college and became one of the "paid" student technicians they put on payroll to make sure the shows actually happened, despite the curriculum based contributions by others too.
Amusing Theatre/Architecture aside: Two theatre undergrads petition to have a mixed grad/undergrad Architecture class "Intro to Computer Aided Design" count as one of their humanities requirements. Petition accepted. First couple weeks are an assessment of current skills/aptitude in various design software, from which the top couple students will be allowed to skip major sections of coursework and instead act as student assistants to help the rest of the class for half the semester. Guess which two kids ended up assisting. The theatre undergrads. ;-)
Some college summers and night-shift jobs were in a lithography lab in a silly effort to get my foot in the door at a moving lights manufacturer. (Silly because there really was no path from lithography to what I was interested in). The rest of my free time was spent tinkering with Linux and hardware, doing a bit of web design, photography, and still drawing. Also started picking up stagehand work at the giant cattle calls for the big arena concerts in central Texas.
I graduated with my theatre degree in 2000 amid the 1st .COM boom... and my first full time day job reflects that. Ended up being an html editor for online technical books at ibooks.com, eventually because of my interests, they let myself and a friend specialize in converting and keeping up with the TLDP (Linux Documentation Project) and several other open source documentation projects into their hosted book format. We both learned Regular Expressions and Perl to assist automating, my first programming language. (Imagine learning Regex first, I do everything backwards!!). Taught myself PHP, SQL, and XML/XSLT in my downtime.
When that bubble collapsed I went running back to theatre and registered with my local Union hiring hall. I joined IATSE (mixed craft local) outside of an organizing drive not long after that in 2005, a lot of our older projectionists were still around in that era and my seniors (Our local used to be a projectionists local), although they were not doing much projection work anymore so I didn't start picking up that craft at that time, though I definitely should have just expressed interest and joined folks in the one or two booths they still played in. My first calls in the building I'm now the house video head/projectionist for were back in that era, but as a carpenter.
It was hard to make ends meet at first and eventually I took another full time computer job as the primary web developer for a local Study Abroad company, a friend was their Sys Admin and this was the era when it was not crazy for a small business to fully host all their own IT infrastructure locally. After a couple years my night owl tendencies, 24hour coffee house habit, and disdain for mornings and showing up on time just to work at a computer with minimal human interaction caught up to me, and I went back into theatre, for good this time.
Industry wise, I tended prefer live theatre, and worked Broadways, Operas, Ballets, Symphony, and any other Concert or Corporate AV work that could be had to fill in those gaps. Over the next 15 years my industry specialties ballooned to include Lighting (Production Electrician or alternatingly Lighting Programmer for both Ballet Austin and Austin Opera). Another area I concentrated on was live Video (Camera Shading, Projectionist, Barco E2/S3 Operator, Livestream Op, Lower-3rds, Graphics, Teleprompting, Records etc). But at least in our town, the best union side money outside of the theatre when films weren't being produced was in rigging, and I was eventually accepted into the cadre of our riggers that staffed the exclusive contract at the convention center. Most of my pandemic was spent doing an automated rigging install at the local PBS station's new soundstage.
After recovering from the pandemic, our local industry was hit with more bad news: that our convention center would be closing and soon demolished for a 4 year project to build a new one on the same footprint but bigger. Being nearly 2/3 of my income with Opera/Ballet being the other 3rd, it was looking pretty grim.
Then our beloved historic Paramount Theatre, our oldest still active Union contract, was in need of a summer DCI projectionist. I expressed interest and was hired on the spot no interview due to my prior work in the building and video/projectionist background. Most of our film is in the summer and technically a separate 3 month contract. But as it happens they had just negotiated to add a full time video department staff person for the staff 10 month contract, which was also offered to me as soon as that first summer film series concluded. It wasn't immediately clear that I would continue to also be the primary projectionist or if they would have to offer it to another as the contracts conflict. Another local video specialized person was offered film the following summer (because I thought better to follow the contract than give up my flex-summers), but as it happens they also added 3 more swing staff positions right after that, so we don't have to pull 70 hour weeks constantly, and he took one of those too! Hah.
Now that we have sufficient (3-4) DCI operators on staff we have mostly agreed we'll just load-share the subsequent summer series, but there will be a lead each summer that can get the 3 month contract (dipping out of the 1st month of their other role). Within my Video Dept Head hat I've essentially taken on the role of principle projectionist and the one responsible for the booth equipment (with the oversight of our TD), which is good, cause I got the rest of this video job in my sleep, getting up to speed on 35mm/70mm tuning, maintenance, and operation was been what is keeping it interesting! Only our TD and one other had any modicum of training with our previous 35mm/70mm projectionist, John Stewart, before his stroke. The projectionist before him, Walter Norris, is our resident booth ghost, whom died of a heart attack during Reel 2 of Casablanca. I unfortunately did not overlap with him, I started being around more on calls as a youngling just after his passing. I did find some of his brand cigarette butts still hanging out under the pedestals when I deep cleaned em though!
Hence why i'm so active on here. My mentors are mostly virtual, in this forum! And for that I sincerely thank you all. Getting 35mm running again after the pandemic hiatus fell onto me, and continuing to pursue improvements has been my axe to grind, our season after that brought back 70mm. Despite learning we still have an endless list of little things to improve upon (budget and time provided), being told 35/70 at the Paramount has NEVER looked as good as it does now feels pretty good! But being relatively new at this I know there are still mistakes to make, lessons to learn, and mountains of prior knowledge i've yet to acquire. I'm just happy to be where I am! Apparently I have the correct level of care and attention to detail, with an appropriately eclectic skillset, to be the right person for this disappearing craft. I know John Stewart had identified me as a potential projectionist not long after meeting me, I guess he was right!
Cinema projection is a relatively recent change to my career path, so it worth sharing how I ended up here, though it is perhaps somewhat traditional from an IATSE perspective, just lacking the unbroken lineage of mentorship.
I did theatre production all through High School, "Techie" as was the term for that age bracket. Enjoyed arts and sciences, especially computer sciences, and mostly survived the hell that is High School by spending the bulk of my time in the Art Room, Newspaper room, or in the scene shop after school. Art Room was the only "serious" computer lab in the school too, with decent machines that could dip their toe in the emergent 3D art sphere in 92-96. I was in the age group that played Myst and was blown away, and learned Strata Studio shortly after, other friends that had PCs focused on 3DStudioMax if they weren't absorbed in making custom level bitmaps for Wolfenstein3D. As far as theatre, lighting design was my main interest but as a senior I did also execute two set designs for HS level productions.
I spent a few HS summers working for my step mother's library and lab furniture company, as a drafting assistant, where I further honed my manual drafting and CAD skillset (granted back on original Pentium 486s... ouch, one quickly learned to not change your viewport very often!). I was so fond of that era later in life that I started collecting HP and Roland pen-plotters. Although really I had an art/photography idea I wanted them for, which I still haven't executed.
For college my interests were kinda evenly split between design fields, architecture, art, and computer science or EE. Somehow a BA in Theatre & Dance (Lighting Concentration) seemed to be a happy combination of all of the above and a comfy space to spend 4 years. I fell into the same patterns in college and became one of the "paid" student technicians they put on payroll to make sure the shows actually happened, despite the curriculum based contributions by others too.
Amusing Theatre/Architecture aside: Two theatre undergrads petition to have a mixed grad/undergrad Architecture class "Intro to Computer Aided Design" count as one of their humanities requirements. Petition accepted. First couple weeks are an assessment of current skills/aptitude in various design software, from which the top couple students will be allowed to skip major sections of coursework and instead act as student assistants to help the rest of the class for half the semester. Guess which two kids ended up assisting. The theatre undergrads. ;-)
Some college summers and night-shift jobs were in a lithography lab in a silly effort to get my foot in the door at a moving lights manufacturer. (Silly because there really was no path from lithography to what I was interested in). The rest of my free time was spent tinkering with Linux and hardware, doing a bit of web design, photography, and still drawing. Also started picking up stagehand work at the giant cattle calls for the big arena concerts in central Texas.
I graduated with my theatre degree in 2000 amid the 1st .COM boom... and my first full time day job reflects that. Ended up being an html editor for online technical books at ibooks.com, eventually because of my interests, they let myself and a friend specialize in converting and keeping up with the TLDP (Linux Documentation Project) and several other open source documentation projects into their hosted book format. We both learned Regular Expressions and Perl to assist automating, my first programming language. (Imagine learning Regex first, I do everything backwards!!). Taught myself PHP, SQL, and XML/XSLT in my downtime.
When that bubble collapsed I went running back to theatre and registered with my local Union hiring hall. I joined IATSE (mixed craft local) outside of an organizing drive not long after that in 2005, a lot of our older projectionists were still around in that era and my seniors (Our local used to be a projectionists local), although they were not doing much projection work anymore so I didn't start picking up that craft at that time, though I definitely should have just expressed interest and joined folks in the one or two booths they still played in. My first calls in the building I'm now the house video head/projectionist for were back in that era, but as a carpenter.
It was hard to make ends meet at first and eventually I took another full time computer job as the primary web developer for a local Study Abroad company, a friend was their Sys Admin and this was the era when it was not crazy for a small business to fully host all their own IT infrastructure locally. After a couple years my night owl tendencies, 24hour coffee house habit, and disdain for mornings and showing up on time just to work at a computer with minimal human interaction caught up to me, and I went back into theatre, for good this time.
Industry wise, I tended prefer live theatre, and worked Broadways, Operas, Ballets, Symphony, and any other Concert or Corporate AV work that could be had to fill in those gaps. Over the next 15 years my industry specialties ballooned to include Lighting (Production Electrician or alternatingly Lighting Programmer for both Ballet Austin and Austin Opera). Another area I concentrated on was live Video (Camera Shading, Projectionist, Barco E2/S3 Operator, Livestream Op, Lower-3rds, Graphics, Teleprompting, Records etc). But at least in our town, the best union side money outside of the theatre when films weren't being produced was in rigging, and I was eventually accepted into the cadre of our riggers that staffed the exclusive contract at the convention center. Most of my pandemic was spent doing an automated rigging install at the local PBS station's new soundstage.
After recovering from the pandemic, our local industry was hit with more bad news: that our convention center would be closing and soon demolished for a 4 year project to build a new one on the same footprint but bigger. Being nearly 2/3 of my income with Opera/Ballet being the other 3rd, it was looking pretty grim.
Then our beloved historic Paramount Theatre, our oldest still active Union contract, was in need of a summer DCI projectionist. I expressed interest and was hired on the spot no interview due to my prior work in the building and video/projectionist background. Most of our film is in the summer and technically a separate 3 month contract. But as it happens they had just negotiated to add a full time video department staff person for the staff 10 month contract, which was also offered to me as soon as that first summer film series concluded. It wasn't immediately clear that I would continue to also be the primary projectionist or if they would have to offer it to another as the contracts conflict. Another local video specialized person was offered film the following summer (because I thought better to follow the contract than give up my flex-summers), but as it happens they also added 3 more swing staff positions right after that, so we don't have to pull 70 hour weeks constantly, and he took one of those too! Hah.
Now that we have sufficient (3-4) DCI operators on staff we have mostly agreed we'll just load-share the subsequent summer series, but there will be a lead each summer that can get the 3 month contract (dipping out of the 1st month of their other role). Within my Video Dept Head hat I've essentially taken on the role of principle projectionist and the one responsible for the booth equipment (with the oversight of our TD), which is good, cause I got the rest of this video job in my sleep, getting up to speed on 35mm/70mm tuning, maintenance, and operation was been what is keeping it interesting! Only our TD and one other had any modicum of training with our previous 35mm/70mm projectionist, John Stewart, before his stroke. The projectionist before him, Walter Norris, is our resident booth ghost, whom died of a heart attack during Reel 2 of Casablanca. I unfortunately did not overlap with him, I started being around more on calls as a youngling just after his passing. I did find some of his brand cigarette butts still hanging out under the pedestals when I deep cleaned em though!
Hence why i'm so active on here. My mentors are mostly virtual, in this forum! And for that I sincerely thank you all. Getting 35mm running again after the pandemic hiatus fell onto me, and continuing to pursue improvements has been my axe to grind, our season after that brought back 70mm. Despite learning we still have an endless list of little things to improve upon (budget and time provided), being told 35/70 at the Paramount has NEVER looked as good as it does now feels pretty good! But being relatively new at this I know there are still mistakes to make, lessons to learn, and mountains of prior knowledge i've yet to acquire. I'm just happy to be where I am! Apparently I have the correct level of care and attention to detail, with an appropriately eclectic skillset, to be the right person for this disappearing craft. I know John Stewart had identified me as a potential projectionist not long after meeting me, I guess he was right!
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