|
|
 
|
|
Author
|
Topic: 1964 World's Fair Projectionists
|
|
|
|
|
Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002
|
posted 06-23-2015 09:53 PM
I remember that exhibit fairly well. I was never in the projection booth, but it was a multi-image, multi-screen projection, probably using punched paper tape to control the projectors, possibly using equipment from AVL (Audio Visual Laboratories), which I believe has been defunct for some years. AVL had several competitors, so it could have been their equipment as well. (I can no longer remember their names).
The MCs would lip-sync the narration. I didn't realize that until the second time I saw it when a different MC had exactly the same voice.
The seating area was the bottom part of the IBM egg. It would drop down to let people leave and enter and then it would rise into the egg for the show.
I loved that exhibit - one of my favorite from the fair. I was in junior high school at the time.
I used AVL equipment for corporate multi-image presentations from 1978 to around 1986. It was very popular before the advent of computer imaging and projection. It was common to run 15 to 30 slide projectors in stacks of 3, sometimes with one stack partly overlapping another stack. For most of my work, which was less complex, we frequently ran 3 stacks of 3 projectors, non overlapping, which gave us a widescreen presentation at an almost 4.5:1 AR. Once the programming units adopted computer technology, they got quite sophisticated and became really easy to program. And you could skip the tape ahead and the projectors would automatically catch-up.
It's hard to believe that Powerpoint and low-res images replaced these multi-image shows which were frequently quite creative and impressive, although sometimes also tacky (lots of glowing logos).
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004
|
posted 06-24-2015 05:58 PM
quote: Scott Norwood
Here is a neat AVL demo
Really enjoyed that.
I was in the UK for the heyday of that stuff, and the manufacturer of choice there was ElectroSonic. Worked with lots of their kit. The big annoyance was that whereas the Ektagraphic for the US market had integrated dimming, but the UK equivalent (S-AV2000) did not, so needed an external dimmer. More annoying, Ektagraphics can happily run on 240V, so it wasn't a different voltage issue! Grrr! Effing Kodak.
The last multislide I saw was at the Antarctic Centre in Christchurch probably a decade back, wayback machine reminds me they once said Enter this spell-binding 14-min audio visual show, a "never to be forgotten" experience! The spine-tingling images and moving sounds create a hushed atmosphere where you are visually transported to Antarctica. Now all gone.
I miss slides... And still have a couple of Ektagraphics, just in case...
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002
|
posted 07-21-2015 09:29 AM
For those of you who are just discovering this, that YouTube video actually represented one of the simplest forms of the presentation: 3 projectors in one stack. Many corporate shows were 3 projectors x 5 stacks and some even incorporated 30 projectors, usually with some overlap. That image posted above of the penguins looks to me to be a 3 projector x 3 stacks show. In the most sophisticated shows, designers were accomplishing animation (albeit at relatively low frame rates). In shows like that, all the projectors constantly moving would sound like machine guns going off in the projection booth.
The thing that was great about it was because it was mostly done with 35mm slides, the resolution was quite high. You could also control a movie projector, even remotely changing film speed and advancing or reversing the film as little as one frame at a time.
Among many other shows, I once produced a corporate presentation that was a satire of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" called "Readers of the Great Books" and when microcomputers were first being adopted in the corporate world, a satire on "A Christmas Carol" called "A Technology Carol" where Scrooge wouldn't let Bob Cratchit have technology. And of course, technology helps cure Tiny Tim. This was all accomplished using multi-image. Video would have been far too expensive to shoot in those days and there would have been a problem presenting video to large groups back then anyway. That would change just a few years later. And when it did and when people switched to inferior computer presentations, all of these companies making this slide control equipment went out of business.
Originally, the devices worked in real time. You'd playback the audio and as you watched the show, if you wanted a 3 second dissolve at a certain point, you'd press that specific button and it would put a pulse on the tape to accomplish that - different pulses for different dissolves or cuts. But as computer tech was implemented, you used a simple programming language instead. So you'd setup all the transitions in advance and as the show played, you'd just press the Enter key and it would execute whatever you set up at that point. Once you did that, it would lock that series of commands to that timecode. They eventually implemented technology where you could start the audio at any point and the projectors would automatically catch up.
It wasn't all perfect though: slides would sometimes get stuck if you didn't use glass mounts, bulbs would blow during shows and before they implemented the tech where projectors could "catch up", shows would go out of sync. Also, in order for animation to work properly, the projectors had to be precisely aligned. There were alignment slides for that purpose and the projectors were held onto the stands with strong springs. In the early days (before my time), which used punched paper tape, the tape would often break.
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
All times are Central (GMT -6:00)
|
|
Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classicTM
6.3.1.2
The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion
and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.
|
Home
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic