Life as a Motion Picture Projectionist in the 1980s
After commenting on a cool video from Stand-up Maths that was filmed on a 35mm cine camera, I found that there were folks who would be interested in details on the topic, so I put together this rather lengthy video talking about my time as a projectionist. Hop around the chapters and enjoy! Here is the original Stand-up Maths video: • We shot a YouTube video about film formats... Here is the original video from the clip showing threading a platter system: • Threading a 35mm Projector for the very la... 00:00 - Introduction 04:40 - The projection booth 06:53 - Daily activities 07:52 - Cleanliness and scratched film 09:07 - Periodic duties outside of day-to-day activities 12:40 - Platter systems 15:04 - Projectors 18:26 - Lamphouses 19:15 - The Sound System 22:08 - Projector Automation Panel 22:40 - What happens when a projector starts? 26:05 - Movie distribution 28:07 - Film formats 29:09 - The alarm panel 30:25 - Film breaks 33:53 - Changing lamps…super scary! 36:40 - Building and tearing down films 40:10 - Wrapup Update: I vaguely recall that we used TWO separate "cross cues", one at the very start of the trailers, when the fire dowser should open, and a second at the time the feature begins. I only mentioned the second one. The first one was necessary when we did fancy things like Interlock, running the same film in multiple through multiple projectors in a lock-step chain. Memory is hazy!

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