WHAT YOU NEED TO OPEN A CINEMA STUDIO

WHAT YOU NEED TO OPEN A CINEMA STUDIO Screen ($250) We built our screen out of 2x4s, a sheet of foam, a piece of white cloth and a bucket of silver paint. Hayley (my sister and business partner, if you’re not familiar with the Indywood team) found this helpful “How to build a screen” info. It did us well. Don’t paint your screen white—that will wash out your image. Paint it a light gray. There’s a reason they call it the “silver screen.” The dimensions of your screen should be 16:9. Don’t put your screen too close to the ground, because people have to be able to read subtitles from the back row. Chairs ($600-$1000) Your audience MUST be comfortable! Our chairs were our first major investment after we opened up. We got a good deal from a hotel liquidation store. They gave us 30 fine, red, luxurious seats for $600. Your chairs should probably be red. That’s just how movie theaters are. Dimmable Lights ($100) It is essential that you are able to dim your lights. There’s something sacred about the moment when the lights go down in a movie theater and the show begins. You want to be able to provide that experience. At Indywood we use a one of these dimmers that you can plug into an extension chord. Wall Paint ($150) Paint the walls of your theater matte-black so they don’t reflect the light of the screen. This will help your image pop and enable your viewers to become fully engrossed in the screen. Curtains: $300 (or Trash Bags: $20) You must block all light from the outside world. That means cover any windows in your space. We started out using trash bags, which solves the problem in utilitarian style. However, for the sake of the aesthetics of your space, it’s good to upgrade to light-canceling curtains. Also, if you have a door that opens directly into your theater, your screen will get washed out by a flood of daylight anytime someone walks into your space for a matinee. You’ll want to hang a curtain to block the light from the door. Soundproofing ($500?) If your theater is close to another business or residence, to maintain good relations with your neighbors, you’ll want to dampen the sound of the movie. It’s also good for protecting your viewers from the sound of motorcyclists and police sirens in the street. This isn’t too big of an issue for us at Indywood, but I’ve seen other theaters solve this problem by stylishly hanging Persian rugs on their walls. The Equipment Projector ($700-$1000) There are two types of digital projector: LED and DLP. As a student of cinematography, I suggest you use DLP. Digital videos, especially compressed ones, can look terribly chunky in the shadowy and out-of-focus parts of an image. DLP projectors help round out this digital chunkiness, because they have an internal chip with thousands of tiny mirrors. Each mirror is an analog for each digital pixel in the image. Because the digital image is bounced off these tiny mirrors, the light from the image has a natural, rounded quality. We’ve done a sort of Pepsi/Coca Cola test comparing an LED and DLP projector, and the filmmakers in the crowd unanimously preferred DLP