Volunteer Projectionist

Martin is not be able to do the mad-man contracting stuff that he used to, all that running around. He does help out with stuff around Cockermouth, though. One of the things that he does is be a Projectionist.

Those of you who know me know that I've been on quite an extended health sabbatical. I've not been completely idle and I've engaged in one or two little projects to keep my self active, and informed of current Programming practises. It's not all PHP, Perl and Java and what-have-you, I also do one or two lighter things. I'm a Projectionist Volunteer at the Kirkgate Centre. The Kirkgate centre is a former school at the bottom of our street which is now an arts centre. There you'll find exhibitions, performance art and cinema. It's largely all run be volunteers and I, for my sins, am a Projectionist.

The mighty projector in all its glory

'Projectionist', as a title, does have a certain kudos to it. It certainly sounds better than Shelf Stacker in a charity shop, or whatever volunteer occupation is open to me these days. Being a Projectionist involves humping the six or seven reels of film, that these things are distributed on, up to the projection booth. Then running each of the reels onto one big reel, about a metre and half in diameter. The reels have to be spliced end-to-end, obviously, with special tape and one makes a little mark with a yellow sticky spot to allow identification of the join. Once all the reels have been spliced together then the film is rewound onto another giant reel and it's ready to show. This involves threading it through the projector and sound-reading head and over various tensioning arms. The correct 'gate' has to be inserted for we're equipped to do wide-screen and CinemaScope. Wide-screen is the simplest. It is a special lens that projects a normal image large, cut down by the right gate you get the 9x16 format. CinemaScope takes a distorted 3x4 image from the film and re-distorts it to 9x16. So, the right gate and lens have to be installed. We're kitted-up with Dolby surround sound, with various fall-backs too. The correct knobs have to be pushed and twiddled with. When film is shown, attention has to be shown to framing and focus, particularly as the splices go through the projector. At the end of the performance the film has to be split up, and the yellow dots are required for this; everything boxed up and switched off. We show only one film, once, each Monday. I enjoy doing it, and so do my largely science-graduate grey-beard slightly trainspotter-ish chums on the rest of the rota.

Sadly there's no mint choc-ices or Kiora. But we do have a reasonably well stocked bar. And I sometimes work behind that too.

What films do we show? Well obviously the latest block-busters are not in our remit. So no Legally Blond Three, sadly, but rather a lot of worthy Independent Cinema from around the world. Not everything, therefore, is in English, and some of the topics can be a little challenging. While some of this stuff tends tends to be a bit TV art-channel late-at-night, they are interesting. That I am a captive audience, and no channel flicking is possible, means I get to watch them all the way through. I can be a non-philistine at times. Just to show the world this, I make a note now and again on Facebook. Yes, I know, Facebook. I can do irony too, it would appear.

In the future things will change, but for now I'm only the deputy. I think that I've not fully shown my technical dabbs as yet, I guess. In time, however, I'll be allowed to go solo.

Technology will change too. There are plans a-foot, as I write this, to introduce digital technology in the shape of a specialised high quality DVD/Blu-ray player. It all sounds a bit of a cheat though, like power-steering or synchromesh gearboxes. The new technology will entail a digital projector of some description. As the auditorium is rather larger than the average living room this will be proper man-sized industrial kit. I and the rest of projectionists are bursting with anticipation.

Cockermouth, 5 December, 2010.

~Z~

Navigation

This is some navigation, it should appear at the side if the page is wide, and at the bottom if it is not.

Gormless Anecdotes

Martin is known for his long-winded e-mails and has decided to inflict them on the Internet like this, suitably cleaned up and formatted. There's the starting page with some explanation, and then, so far:

• Hunting the Flush Bug
• Chemi-Luminescent Vim
• Helping With an Enquiry
• Light From Under the Door
• I Write Like David Foster Wallace
• The Origami Artist
• Pattern Matching Randomness
• The Indole Chemistry of Bananas
• Volunteer Projectionist

Also of Interest

Jucy morsels from the rest of the site:

• General papers on On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP). It's still the main topic of the web-site.
• Some site news; it's a sort of infrequently updated journal for Martin too.
• Rather specific Technical Notes, Martin can still bore people in the Third-person past tense.
• Of the little hacks that he's done recently, the Unofficial Jobcentre Plus Mirror is the one thing that seems to have gained traction.
• Other ephemeral, eclectic stuff. Mostly photographs.

About the Author

His name is Martin Sullivan. He's a fifty-something some-time computer programmer living in the quaintly named town of Cockermouth in north-west England.

The Company

ZOIS Limited is basically a vehicle for Martin and his OLTP work, he owns it. You can find out more about it elsewhere on the main site.

Pro-Bono Plug

Martin is currently on a health sabbatical, but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of therapeutic recovery. So, if you've anything that he can tackle on a non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him know. Unsurprisingly, he's particularly interest in biology, again, and the application of computing to it.