the cinema

Today I learned about film. 35mm reels that they use in theaters. Did you know that a feature length film takes up about 6 reels, each 2,000 feet long? A reel runs for about 22 minutes. Bob at the Old Greenbelt Theater told me. He saw me and Esther looking at a historic projector they have there after we watched Thank You for Smoking and then wouldn't stop talking.

I learned a few things about film:
Ignoring the pixelated-looking stuff, the wavy white lines to the right of the sprockets are the optical sound. The projector actually reads those and translates them into the sound for the film. Some digital systems are on a separate disc, so the tracking can get out of sync with the film, but with optical sound, they can't be separated. This makes me wonder why the sound got all screwed up in Singin in the Rain, so I must be missing something. And the image is always squished like that, and the projector shows it stretched out. He told us lots of other stuff too, but I forget.

I've always wondered why theaters don't switch completely to digital, when they mostly all use digital sound. You have this high quality sound, but the image looks kinda messy still and you get those screen blips of hairs or that oval thing...do you know what I'm talking about? But now I'm wondering why they even do digital sound when they could use optical on the same reel. Film is so cool, I'm glad theaters still use it.

And I like it when people are so passionate about stuff that they can't help telling you all about it. So thanks Bob. I like film too.

And then we all smoked cigars. Not really, but I wanted to.