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I helped in the projection booth at Full Frame again this year. This is A. breaking down a 35mm print of.... urgh, I don't remember. At the Carolina Theatre, they have a platter system which allows for enough space for all of the reels of a film to be spliced together in one giant reel. That way, you don't have to use a two-projector system. But, after the film, you have to break it down and get all of the reels back together in their metal cases to send back to the distributor. A. was trying to avoid having to do that at the end of the festival so he did a few each day when there was a break. I love talking to A., the projectionist that was there. He's a really cool dude and I don't have to do hardly anything when he's in there doing his thing because I only do the video stuff. We watched Crazy Love (Dan Klores 2007) on the monitors in the booth and we were totally floored when story twists. We even talked about it the next day. I noticed that none of the other tech people talked about any of the films they saw unless they were totally knocked out by them. So it seemed extra surprising that A. liked Crazy Love just as much as I did.

If you attended Full Frame this year, I'd love to hear about the film(s) you saw. I saw a bunch.

Here is more about what I did this past weekend, in case you are interested. They have two of us in the Fletcher auditorium booth handling video stuff in addition to any projectionist that may need to be there. Everything is already set up physically and mentally by the tech crew, so for volunteers like me, I do very simple things like putting in the tape for the little trailer before the movie, getting the screen to black, playing the movie on tape, and opening the projector shutter again to let the film show on the screen. We do sound tests before the show, too. I guess it helps to know a bit about the engineering of the set up, but that was much easier this year than last because the switcher was programmed to do everything - even setting the ratios for the high definition formats. I had fun because I felt more confident than last year, my first year doing tech. The best part was when I got to tell the venue manager on the walkie-talkie that they could "open the house". That's a pretty big power trip, quite honestly. If I got a chance to do it more than once this weekend, my head would be very big right now.