Have you ever been obsessed over a song; so completely in love with the way those sounds make you feel, you had to let others hear.
And you do. And when you play it for them, on their sound system, it sounds SHIT. It’s 20% of the experience you’ve felt anytime you’ve personally listened to it. The sounds are groggy, disparate, devoid of all things that make life worth living. But why? How could this happen? 😩
This is the Story and Pain of Cinema.
Cinema at its most basic is the marriage of the sound and the visual, a ceremony of emotion.
As a Moviemaker, once you’ve shot a movie, completed it, and want to release it, a problem sets in.
The Exhibition Problem.
To enjoy a movie, you need three things Good Sound. Good Image. Large Screen.
Good sound because half the emotion in a movie is communicated through sound. Good image because the remaining half of the emotion is communicated through image. And a large screen because the effect sound and image has is amplified the more we can see it.
Without all these things, say you watch on a phone, something modern with a 5" screen; small details, expressions, movement, landscapes, the detailed sounds that accompany them, lose presence.
Amongst the mountains, where rising rocky peaks loom over all things, a wee vessel is allowed passage. This vessel, a little bantam helicopter, struggles before coming to a stop, holding itself in the air, its blades slowed into a drift, then a stillness, the way glue goos gears of a machine. The engine whine fades to a cease.
Like a ball dropped from the sky, it falls, at a speed so slow you could think you could touch it, push it away, but its strength grows, its velocity, its inertia, its a cannonball falling from the sky; gripped, yanking her down, the put after the shot, towards the mountains. Mountain faces swarm her periphery, broad and total - the sound of rushed air whipping her ears. Rapid violent whistling like Banshees in-Nishmore.
Cinemas are a way around the Exhibition Problem; all over the country with a set system, large screens, good sound, good image.
The problem?
Small movies don’t benefit from cinemas because it’s expensive and small movies don’t make money, even if they are very good.
Most who watch a small movie, often a short of some sort, will do so in the worst possible way.
One friend watch my movie on a bus, on a phone, with no sound, and only subtitles.