80th Year 1930 - 2010

THE CRAZE for making home movies began its popularity in the Twenties when Kodak introduced its 16mm gauge, several months earlier than Path‚'s 9.5mm. Film societies were formed throughout Britain, and in 1928 an
attempt was made to organise some form of national representation of the cine movement with an Amateur Kinematograph Conference held at Torquay.

     By 1930 there were 27 active cine clubs in the London area alone, 69 in the provinces, 12 in Scotland and three in Wales. Many of these fell by the wayside after a short while, like the South London Amateur Film Society
which came into being in 1929, ran one dance and promptly expired!  The inaugural meeting of the Finchley Amateur Cinematograph Society took place at Fern Bank Hall, Gravel Hill, Finchley, on Tuesday, June 24,
1930. Mr Leslie Marsh took the chair and the audience was enthusiastic and unanimous in voting that the Society should be started, the names of 25 intending members were taken and it was hoped to double that number at the
next meeting. Officers were appointed and given the task of formulating the rules of the Society and it was hoped to obtain a studio/clubroom 'to be fitted out for regular meetings and the photography of moving pictures'.

Imagine having a whole cinema to play with for a morning. It all started back in May when Ian Morris met up with one of the directors of the Phoenix at a party. Ian persuaded them that in exchange for a modest contribution to the cinema funds a group pf members could come along for 2 hours to the the cinema and show their own films using their new digital projector. Just to give you an idea of what this means - whilst our club's present projector cost £1200 and goes up to 8 foot wide, the Phoenix's digital projector cost £80,000 and goes up to 25 feet wide.

Ian and Peter started by making a preliminary visit in early July to check out the techincal requirements. We established that we could plug the following leads into their system - HDMI, VGA monitor, S-lead and a component lead. Of course the projector is a 2K HD capable made by NEC with a specialist interface3 made by Christie.

So on Sunday July 27th 10 members and ex members of the society climbed up the very narrow stairs to squeeze into the tiny projection box. It was a very tight squeeze as they had a large conventional 35mm projector plus a mouthwatering range of video kit in a room not much bigger than your average bathroom. We presented the very helpful projectionist with a selection of mini DV and HDV tapes and a couple of SD DVDs. In addition ex member David Blundell had bought along an HD capable Mac Book Pro and a Toshiba HD DVD machine with an HD disk that he had burned.

We then all retired to the auditorium along with a walkie-talkie to talk back to the projection box. As each section was played the owner gave a quick explanation as to what it was etc. All went well except that David's HD DVD player would not talk to the interface - so we skipped it. The material varied - HD shot on relatively cheap HDV cameras, better HD shot on higher quality HD cameras (including Mike's new Sony EX1) SD from mini DV and DVD and some dowloaded HD quicktime files.

It has to be said that the sheer impact of seeing your own material on a screen area over 6 times the size you have ever seen it before in the ambience and size of a cinema auditorium is jaw dropping. In addition what was impressive and surprising was that all the home-shot stuff looked very good even if it was SD. The difference between SD and HD was not as dramatic as we expected. However the one exception to this was the material (eg cinema trailers) that David had downloaded from the internet and played out from a laptop did look markedly superior presumably becasue it had been shot on cinema qulaity film cameras.

The 2 hours went all too quickly even without any Kiora or Butterkist and we were soon out blinking into the real world ready to face the club BBQ. If only we could have this cinema every Friday!