fly_free

In the old days, there were no large reels. Rather than splicing the smaller reels the film comes in onto one large reel, there were two projectors. The cigarette burns are there to time the switching of the projectors.

When you loaded the film into projector 1 there was a little bell that was set up. This bell would go off when there was about two minutes of film left. When the bell went off we would flip an egg timer. When the egg timer ran low you started looking for the burns. When the first burn showed up you started running projector 2, when the second burn showed you closed the aperture on projector 1 and opened the aperture on projector 2.

I wouldn't say it was a stressful job, but those two minutes durring a reel change was pretty nerve racking. More than once I screwed something up and created a 1-5 minutes delay in the middle of the movie.

For nostalgias sake I looked it up on youtube. This guy goes a pretty good job of going through the process. I liked it becasue we had the carbon arc light source in my theather too, in 2001. I was pretty sad when I heard they put in light bulb lamp sources after I left

I ran film projectors in my home town movie theather. They were quite old, rather than splicing the film together we had two projectors. The burn marks that you see on most film, we acutally needed and used those. It was awsome.

The projectors didn't have light bulbs, but had metal rods that looked and worked like arc welders. This was 2001 by thy way.

Hey, just read your blog post on the mag switch. I love the illustrations but am mildly infuriated that you did not include the field depiction of the magnets in the off position and not in the steel housing. What the heck does that look like?