I am often distracted by the horizontally-oriented oval that appears at intervals in the top-right corner when you’re watching a film.
It’s black, with a rough edge that is tinged either yellow or green.
Is it an indicator for an approaching end-of-reel? Something else?
What I find maddening about it is that when I mention it to my friends, they invariably don’t know what I’m talking about. It tends to make me nervous when I can apparently see something that others don’t. It mystifies me how anyone can miss it, it’s pretty big, even if it is there for only 1/24th of a second.
I thought that the best improvement of the digital presentation of Attack of the Clones over traditional film was the absence of that damned thing.
It has something to do w/ changing the reel of the film. It’s an indicator for the projector operator, I believe. Didn’t you see Fight Club?
And, what were you doing watching that terrible movie TWICE?!? The only improvement they could have made was some type of character development, and a coherent plot.
It indicates it’s time to change the reel, but I believe it’s somewhat outdated since reels are changed by machines/computers now - in the olden days someone had to do it by hand.
There is a black dot every 15 minutes - the first one lets the reel-changer know to get ready, and the second dot 5 seconds later tells them to start the next reel.
The previous posters are correct. I believe there are two such marks: the first is to warn the projectionist (sort of a two minute warning type of thing) and the second is for the actual switchover.
does anyone really change reels anymore? I was up in the projection booth once working with the projectionist guy on the sound levels of a film I edited and at least with my film, all the reels had been spliced together and put on one giant horizontal reel beforehand.
[sub]And it was confirmed by a friend of mine during a projectionists strike. A cinema trained her (she was an usher) in case of desperate measures. (But it got sorted out before she had to scab.)[/sub]
All who read this thread will suffer the same fate. This was pointed out and explained to me several years ago. Before that happened, I never noticed the spots. Now I always notice the bastards.
Hell, when I was in college, our film series had a broken projector one term, so you have to wait a couple of minutes so they could change reels. You got to know that when you saw the circle, the film would stop in a minute.
I got so used to it that the next time I was in a theater, I saw the circle and was amazed that the film didn’t stop.
Nowadays, most films are shown on trays, not reels. The trays hold an entire movie so there’s no need for switching projectors.
Thanks! The constant claims by everyone I go to movies with that they’ve never noticed any such thing was beginning to worry me. I guess I correctly intuited what it was about.
I’ve never seen Fight Club– have to rectify that soon, if only because it’s referenced so frequently.
JAPrufrock– Character development? Coherant plot? But… it’s Star Wars! Why mess with what works?
The first mark, and it varied in color/shape, sometimes made to look like a flaw in the film, lasted for 3 frames. It gave us projectionists a 10 (15?) second warning that the end was near. The second, identical, 3-frame mark said, “do it now,” and the overworked projectionist pulled the chain that simultaneously released the clutch and firescreen in the second projector, standing by with the next reel cued up to begin. The first projector’s lamp was extinguished at the same time. If the projectionist forgot the changeover, there was 3 seconds of film before it ran out and the audience started screaming. If done right, less than a frame was lost and the audience was clueless.
Each 35mm reel was about 20 minutes long, so the single-screen projectionist could take a chance and leave for a short snack, but not a long meal.
Nowadays, the reels/rolls are spliced together into one, continuous platter, held horizontally and fed from the center. In some high-volume theaters where the same flick is running (at slightly different start times) the same piece of film may feed thru 2 projector systems sequentially, each projector serving a different viewing room.
Won’t be long until this will be obsolete, and all flix will be sent over the Internet in a digital format. No more film.
I seriously doubt that any major-chain movie theaters need to change reels during a film anymore. As several folks have pointed out, the platters on modern projectors are quite capable of holding an entire movie.
This came up in a thread about two years ago, and there was some really interesting stuff written by some folks who know the industry pretty well. Read Kepi’s and ArchiveGuy’s posts in this thread.
That is brilliant. I’m surprised that distributors don’t scream their heads off about it, though. (Not that they ought to, but I can imagine litigation claiming that simultaneous showings in divided theatres requires the operators to pay for the use of two prints of the film…)
I never noticed them until I started watching movies with a friend (who occasionally did projectionist stuff) who would whisper “cue dot” every time one happened.
I do think that most people don’t see them.
I noticed a very easy to spot “cigarette burn” in The Two Towers. It is so noticable because it occurs in a scene where one of the Nazgul is flying away into the distance in the top right corner of the screen and the oval suddenly pops on screen right where the Nazgul is/was. I can’t remember whether it was the scene where Frodo and co. are in the Dead Marshes or when they are in Osgiliath. Anyway, Larry Mudd, tell your friends to look for it if they are watching that movie.
The first one I remember seeing was in the original, 1982, ‘First Blood’ – it appeared at the end of a scene in the police station, over the face of a sadistic sheriff’s deputy who was torturing John Rambo, which seemed surreally intentional.
Actually, I think they’re paid a percentage of the tickets sold. So running the same movie in multiple auditoriums would only enhance revenue for both the theater and the movie producers/distributors.
