TheaterBlog: More Screen Progress

Oh we're getting close.

With doors hung and all of the drywall work done in the rest of the basement (and thus no chance for even more dust to get in the theater), we put in the call for the carpeting people to bring the theater carpet by. Ryan Kramer (the designer of the theater) suggested 'Wavelength' from Masland Carpet and he updated the render to include what the carpet would look like installed:

It's definitely a busy carpet but I'm hoping it'll break up the monotony of black walls and black seats, not to mention that it's going to be pretty dark in there so hopefully it'll add some visual interest to the floor. We'll see what happens come next Wednesday :)

I've been trying to get things moving on the theater for the past couple of weeks, last night Manny and I tried to get the CineSlide and ISCO III (anamorphic lens) working. I didn't have a remote for the CineSlide so we spliced a 9-pin serial cable and a 4-pin RJ11 (telephone) cable together to control the device. If you happen to own a CineSlide, do remember that you can't just use a standard serial-to-CAT5 adapter, the sled only needs two pins connected and they are not a part of the standard serial-to-CAT5 pinout for an adapter you'd use to configure a router for example.

Getting the CineSlide working wasn't much of an issue after we built the right cable, send it a command to turn on, send it another to slide the lens in front of the projector and another to slide it out of the way. Unfortunately after getting the slide working we discovered a problem. The CineSlide was the only thing we hadn't tested at this point, and I had just assumed that we could make the lens stop wherever we needed it to. Unfortunately it can only slide completely to one side or the other, and there wasn't enough room on the reinforced mounting surface near the projector to accommodate this. The problem was that when in the "on" position, the lens would slide too far to the left and not let the light beam pass through. I had to move the projector, so today I did that:

See how the PJ is now left justified? Thankfully, like many of these projectors, it has a horizontal lens shift that will allow me to continue to project at the center of the screen

I also got to see how troublesome it would be to remove the projector once in its little hideaway. The process takes two people and a good 20 - 30 minutes to do carefully, and it's going to be even more of a pain once there are seats in the theater. If I had to do it again I'd drop the projector even further down from the ceiling just to make swapping/maintenance easier. Tomorrow, if I've got time, I'll get the CineSlide and anamorphic lens installed up there too.

I'm trying to get the screen fabric installed, but before that I needed to cover the OC703 along the front wall. I used velcro and tacks to cover the OC703 with accoustically transparent cloth:

The screen frame is also wrapped with fidelio velvet that I ordered from here (remember the starfield ceiling website? this one is almost as good). The velvet is great at absorbing light, so any overscan from the projector hopefully won't be too distracting:

It's soft

...and dark

Check out the gallery for more pictures of the current state, tomorrow if I can get enough help from friends and fam we may be able to make some serious progress...