Sunday, December 02, 2012


Sometimes things work out just perfect. In a category that all the puzzle-pieces of an endeavour fit together as per hoped, right on the perfect day, so well they fall right under the category of 'couldn't have been better if written in a script'.

Thanks to the more then generous donations, purchases, efforts and attendance of our amazing patrons at the Mayfair, at a meeting this-afternoon with our projectionists we were able to discuss our upcoming digital projector purchase. We will make the addition to our projection booth equipment when the shiny new technology is installed sometime soon after Christmas. That is of course the important fact to make note of...the new projector will be sitting beside its 35mm projector grandpa. Unlike most theatres across the globe, we will be hanging onto the ability to screen 35mm prints. Studios will soon stop producing 35mm prints, but we own a library of a couple hundred films, and there are a number of resources from whom we hope to keep acquiring existing film prints from.

There is a bit of film-geek negativity towards the extinction of 35mm film and arrival of digital presentation (though it's not so new anymore, as movies have been screened via digital for quite some time now). I do not share these feelings, and have a very glass half full point-of-view towards the whole thing. I'm especially excited that we'll have an expanded catalogue of movies to pick from, as studios make more titles available from their vaults in the dcp format. We will have movies showing up on the calendar as soon as January 2013 that we have never been able to screen before, and I think that that is something to be quite excited about.

After our meeting, at the screening of Scarface hosted by our friend Thom Ernst from TVO's Saturday Night at the Movies, we were able to make the official announcement about our successful projector fundraising efforts to the audience in attendance. A wonderful day all-in-all, and I think very soon any film / digital debate will be left by the wayside, and we can concentrate on the simple desire to program and screen great movies. We also had a giant birthday cake, everyone loves birthday cake.

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