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News and Comment December 2022

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8 December (Part 1) - Mission Impossible?

Sidcup cinema Sidcup cinemaOne of the more interesting articles in the new Bexley Magazine is the contribution from Preston Benson, founder of The Really Local Group. It is about the new cinema which Bexley Council said would open in the Spring of 2022. (Preston now says Q4 2022 so he had better get a move on.)

Some have said, including me, that the building is ugly and the Council’s photo shown here does it no favours but I am much more interested in what is to be found inside.

Ever since my teenage years when I was allowed to fiddle with the local Odeon’s arc lamp and switch projectors when the 20 minute film reels ran out, I have been interested in the technology. Circa 1962 I made a film with a friend which was shown just once by the BFI on the South Bank. I am pretty sure it was crap by modern standards but I cannot check because someone stole the only copy.

I was at BAFTA on Piccadilly for the very first digital theatre presentation in the UK and before that at Ealing film studios for one of the first demonstrations of DVD where film professionals were told of the serious limitations within the format and how to make films that avoided the pitfalls. You don’t see dissolves between film shots any more.

Strangely enough I never got into DVDs myself but I backed the blu-ray format when HD-DVD discs became available and since then collected quite a lot of them. Neither do I go to the cinema very often, mainly because I find the experience disappointing, especially the audio systems.

Despite there being no direct trains to Sidcup after this coming weekend and the bus taking far too long I will be going to the Story House or whatever the name is this week as soon as I can.

Designing three screens into a relatively small building would have been an interesting project and containing the sound difficult but it can presumably be done. At home I can put my speakers in danger of burn out and still cannot hear them in the front garden.

I imagine the screen will be bigger than mine although I was once warned before entering one of the Leicester Square cinemas that the screen was very small and did I want my money back before the film started, so anything is possible.

I shall however be both surprised and disappointed if the sound is better than I achieve at home. Compared to me, cinema operators have a much bigger problem. Some people like films realistically loud and others pathetically quiet. My father once took me into the wind tunnel where he was testing a jet engine. When I show Top Gun Maverick I know what jet engines really sound like and anything less will not do.

I am very much hoping that Councillor Craske’s pet project will be a success. It’s about time he broke his duck.

  

 

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