Birmingham | William Hook

A week or two ago, I sent a tweet to @imaxbirmingham on Twitter and asked if I could have a tour of the projection room. I’ve only ever seen projection rooms by looking through the window, and I’ve never seen an IMAX projector in person, so I thought it was worth a go to ask – and it was! The next day, I got an email from their PR manager, Caroline, asking if I’d like to go along one day and see it, as a special once-off treat. So, yesterday (30th Jan), I went along to Birmingham with my dad (he expressed an interest in coming along), and met up with Caroline’s colleague, Sally, who gave us a tour.

So, up we went in the escalator to the 5th floor, which is the upper part of the IMAX theatre, normally off limits to normal visitors. The 4th floor is where you usually exit the theatre, and the 5th is all the behind the scenes stuff. Walking out the escalator, there was a small hand-operated forklift (for lifting the film reels), about 50 boxes of the Harry Potter film, and a few large metal cases with film reels in them. Quick explanation: when they get the film, it’s in boxes, so it has to be manually spliced together into one long film. Anyway, moving on, down the hall we went, and into the projection room!

So, the projection room. First and foremost is the huge IMAX projector – it’s MUCH larger than a 35mm projector, and along with the film reels behind it, it takes up a lot of room, as you can see:

The projector itself is pretty much the same basic idea as any other projector, just bigger. The first thing you notice are the pipes coming out the back of it – the big one is for air cooling, the smaller ones are for water cooling, mainly for the £3,500 Xenon bulb (which, while we’re at it, only lasts 900 hours, which isn’t much compared to, say, my home projector). In fact, the cooling is so critical that there’s a pump room next to the projection room, which has backup pumps if needed, and uses its own dedicated water supply from (I presume) the council. The air also has another role – somehow, through some fancy complicated method, it uses compressed air to keep the film rock solid steady. If you go to and IMAX flick yourself, doubtless you’ll notice that. Compared to normal cinemas, it pretty much doesn’t move at all. Impressive stuff.

Next, obviously, is the 70mm film. Since Avatar 3D was about to be shown, it was loaded into the projector, almost ready to go. As it’s a 3D title, there’s a separate reel of film for both the left and right eye. These run through the projector around the front and then pop out the other side to go back onto two separate reels. The way they do it, is that the film is loaded from the centre of the reel. This means that once it’s done, there’s no need to rewind the reel back to the start point, unlike normal cinemas. This obviously saves time, which is a bonus, plus it means the film doesn’t suffer the extra stress – especially for something like Avatar, which they’ve sold over 51,000 tickets for, which is a lot of screenings.

In the same room they also have a selection of the other currently showing titles – such as Deep Sea, Space Station, and so on.

Now for the noisy part. The audio. It’s pretty simple really. The audio isn’t on the film itself, it’s delivered digitally, either on a DVD or HDD, and stored on one of the servers (two HDDs, one of which is a backup). The IMAX projector sends out a pulse to the server every so often, so the sound is always kept in sync. The soundtrack is a six channel mix, which is then delivered to all of the sixteen power amplifiers, and then to the bi-amped speakers within the theatre. So, obviously, it’s quite loud. And since there’s a DVD drive and microphones hooked up to it all, you actually could have a karaoke night if you rented the cinema.

And a video of the control panel for the whole system (which I got to start the film with myself! ):

Finally, as well as the IMAX projector, there are two other projectors next to it – a 35mm projector, which is used for the pre-show trailers (eg, Pearl and Dean advertising), as well as a generic office-style projector which they use to show the PowerPoint presentation that shows upcoming films at the IMAX and other announcements.

And, of course, here’s a video of the projector in action. It’s very loud – if you’re standing next to it it sounds like a generator. And it’s not even loud compared to the pump room I mentioned earlier – that’s much louder.

So, that’s the projection room. Anyway, walking back out into the lobby and around the maze of passages, I also saw their dishwasher. Yes, a dishwasher. Technically, it’s not used for dishes, but it’s a big silver machine about the length of a car, which washes and dries off all the 3D glasses after they’re used, so they’re nice and clean for new people to use. They’re then carted back out to the lobby, where they’re handed out for the next screening. And lastly, we looked at the back of the screen itself – nothing much back there, it’s mostly just scaffolding holding up the screen (which, indecently, had to be lowered in through the roof when they built it because it’s so large), along with some surprisingly small speakers. The screen itself is silver, with millions of tiny holes in it for the sound to pass through (which most, if not all theatres have anyway). And that’s it!

An interesting thing (I hope I’m allowed to say this ) that Sally mentioned is that she’s flying off to Belgium in the next few weeks to go and find out more about the new digital IMAX projectors, to maybe upgrade the theatre to at a later date. That would mean that the projector wouldn’t need the huge reels behind it, nor would they need all the film either, as the films would then be delivered on a simple hard drive. And one hard drive is a lot better than 50 boxes of heavy plastic! Plus, of course, you get the benefits of going digital – the film doesn’t degrade, the quality is better, and so on.

Overall, it was very interesting seeing all the different parts of the cinema, finding out how it all works, and seeing it all in action, so I would like to, of course, say a big thank you to Sally, Caroline, and the rest of the people at Millennium Point for letting me go and see it all.

Note: All the images shown have further notes explaining them on Flickr, so be sure to click through to see them.

Ah, Birmingham. Some people love it, some people hate it. Personally, I both love and hate it. I love the fact that it has a nice cinema, an IMAX, a pretty nice shopping centre, an Apple Store, two nice big arenas, and so on, but I hate the fact that, outside of that, it’s a ugly dump of a city. Seriously, outside the recent development, there’s nothing remotely making me want to live there, or even drive though it. AT ALL.

MacBook.

Anyway, enough of that. So, on Monday the 16th of November, on the exact day that my warranty expired, I decided to finally get my MacBook fixed. Yeah, this is the problem I had. It took me a whole year to get it fixed. Honestly, the problem was there, and it was bugging me, but I just seemed to live with it for the year until the last minute – it’s safe to say that it’s now all fixed, and the keyboard is nice and matte again (it had turned shiny from one year of use), and of coursed, fixed.

The problem is that when I went on the 16th, two days later, I got a cold – most likely because I went into Birmingham in the freezing wind with not much on at all. T-shirt and a hoodie, that’s it. So it’s my fault. I had a sore throat/nose, but I was in bed (and, er, on the computer when mum wasn’t looking ) for about a week. Anyway, I was up and about from the 25th Nov again, and only now do I feel almost 100%. I’m still coughing slightly but for the most part I feel fine.

MIIIIIIIICHAEL MCINTYREEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Take two. I had planned to go before (see here), but my dad actually broke his leg in August, so sadly we (we = me and parents) had to cut short the whole journey and not go. However, I got some more tickets for the 30th Nov (which is technically yesterday) and saw him then, but at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham instead of the O2. End result? Awesome. Funny as ever and it was great seeing him live. If he ever goes on tour again (and I presume he will), I’ll be going again for sure.

Oh yeah, and here are some videos. Enjoy: http://twitvid.com/1A465 (the arena), http://twitvid.com/19BE6 (comedy), and http://twitvid.com/98EBC (moar comedy).

The Journey Home? Not so much.

We (we = myself and mum) decided to go by car instead of the train as, well, it’s easier (and last time I went to the NIA, for Cirque Du Soleil, it was actually pretty much dead quiet when we came out). Or so I thought. Half the problem is that by train, there’s a one mile or so walk to the arena, and in the freezing wind, it’s bloody cold. Plus it’s Birmingham so we wouldn’t have made it back to the train anyway, due to stabbing.

Right, so, car journey down was okay. Not brilliant – I mean, the M6, at 6pm, on a weekday, yeah, there’s bound to be some traffic, and there was. It wasn’t too bad though – about a ten minute delay in total. And I managed to botch up the TomTom’s directions a little. All in all, though, that was fine. So, we went in, saw Mr McIntyre, and because our seats were in block 11 in the arena, we made it out and to the car within about 5 minutes of the end of the show. Perfect. So, we back out the bay parking bay, drive around the corner (we were on the roof of the parking garage), and end up behind a queue of cars. For an hour. Yes, an HOUR. I managed to listen to Robbie Williams’ entire new album in the car. One song after that, and we were finally out. It turns out they decided to empty the entire car park, level by level, before we managed to get out of it all. Lovely. Anyway, as soon as we were out, it was fine, until about 5 minutes later when we hit the rest of the traffic. Oh boy.

So, 45 minutes later and we finally were on the M6 and doing more than 40mph. Half the problem with the traffic jam is that the idiot roadworkers decided to close off half of the “expressway” between the central Birmingham area and the M6, for roadworks (At 11pm? At least wait until midnight!), so we had to go around the long route. Anyway, once we were on the last stretch of the expressway to the M6, it was fine…and then we arrived at the M6. Europe’s busiest motorway. Oh, yeah, and due to roadworks, they had turned it into a one lane road travelling at a whopping 10mph. Amazingly enough, they were ACTUALLY THERE, and ACTUALLY WORKING. I almost fainted. Yet, alas, only about 300 meters worth of roadworks required (I counted) 14 miles of motorway to be slowed down to 50mph, and have cones and warning signs and so on all the way along it. What the hell for? As Jeremy Clarkson said on Top Gear this past weekend, surely the point of dropping the limit to 50 is to protect the workforce? What workforce? Why not put the speed limit back up to 70 when they’re not there (so…all the time).

Anyway, that’s enough ranting. End of the day, Michael McIntyre was brilliant and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Also, note to self: take the train next time.