Cine Falcatrua : Building your own MOVIE THEATER

Gabriel Menotti

Step ONE: Movies

A movie theater's soul and reason of being are the movies it exhibits. So, when you build your indie projection room in your garage, there's no point screening family holyday videos – as alternative as it may seem. The audience will end up thinking it's just another videoinstallation.

Nowadays, the Internet is the most appropriate place for acquiring audiovisual material. The Net implodes the movie industry's heavy distribution system. You no longer have to wait that one of the few celluloid copies of that Cantonese movie arrive in your city, only to be exhibited without the proper financial reward. You yourself can have direct access to it. You just have to lose some hours of broadband connection downloading. The cost is minimal, and it multiplies the opportunities of exhibition of rare and independent movies.

Fine sources for obtaining movies are sites like Isohunt and PirateBay , whose directories are frequently updated by users. To use them, you have to have a BitTorrent client. There are many options available; we suggest Azureus or Shareaza . After installing one of them in your computer, you just have to click in a .torrent file to start the download.

Step TWO: Codecs and Subtitles

Now that you have the movie in your computer, you must prepare it to be exhibited. The first thing you have to worry about is its codec . A codec is a compression algorhythm, used to keep the movie file size small, so that it can be shared online. You must have the proper codec installed in your computer to play the file. But, since there are many different codecs, you may never know which to use.

A cheap and dirty solution for solving codec problems is to use a codec pack, which comes with several codecs for movie playback. You may choose the likes of K-Lite , Matroska or FFDShow . Install one of them in the computer you will use in your movie theater and your problems are almost solved.

Another obstacle for the movie exhibition may be the idiom. If the movie is in a language your audience doesn't understand, you'll have to subtitle it. That's not a big deal: there are many sites out there with subtitle files ready to use. Try Extratiles or DivX Subtitles , for example.

The subtitles are text files with a special codification. They are played along with the movie, in synchronization, by certain movie players. Good softwares for doing it are BS Player and VLC Media Player . You just have to put the subtitle in the same directory of the movie, with the same file name.

Step THREE: Projection

Now that we have amazing movies ready to be projected, we must build the structure to exhibit them: the movie theater itself.

The perfect place for a movie theater is a dark, quiet and cool room. But that's not really necessary. You can use your garage, an auditorium or a neighborhood association, for example – or even a park or other public space. If the place doesn't have chairs, just ask the patrons to bring them, or to be prepared to sit on the floor.

Your movie projector will be the same computer you used to download the movies. Besides that, you'll need a DLP projector and a good pair of speakers (guitar amps will do). The screen can be a white wall or sheet.

Plug the computer's VGA-out in the projector, and the audio-out in the speakers. For that, you will need a p2-p10 cable, easy to find in any electronics shop. Now, just load the movie and the subtitles in the movie player, put it fullscreen, turn off the lights and press play!

With these few steps, any place can be transformed in an avant-première movie theater!

Required MATERIAL
- Computer
- DLP Projector
- Speakers
- White sheet
- Digital movie files
- A bunch of softwares
- Strong arms
- Lawyers
- Chutzpah

Useful WEBSITES
www.isohunt.com
www.thepiratebay.org
www.getazureus.com
www.shareaza.com
www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm
packs.matroska.org
sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow
titles.box.sk
www.bsplayer.com
www.videolan.org

Cine Falcatrua (portuguese for “ Cine Hoax ”) is a project that works in the borderline between cinema's hyper-authorized environment and the new media fluid ecology. It aims to rethink cultural industry using digital home technologies, questioning audiovisual distribution and exhibition.

Our concerns are not conceptual discussions about film production, or the deeper meaning of a movie, but practical questions normally cast aside. What to do with a film after we finish it? How to make it reach the spectators? In which ways the social texture influences the distributors' criterions? What place does the movie theater occupy in the urban space?

contact us!
cinefalcatrua@gmail.com
fotolog.com/cinefalcatrua