‘It’s come a long way from just putting a film on’

Behind a door marked ‘private’ next to 42-seat Cinema 2, and up a twisting wooden staircase into the pitched roof of the late-Victorian warehouse that now houses Watershed, is the cinema team’s projection room.

Great metal wheels for looping spools of 35mm film, boxes of sound equipment and miles of coiled cable stand next to state-of-the art digital projectors in this space that becomes cave-like when a film begins and the lights are dimmed. By the stairs is a recently-delivered cardboard box containing a precious print of a silent film, couriered in for an upcoming screening as part of Bristol Slapstick Festival.

This is the domain of technical resources manager Ewan Dunford and his team. They are currently basking in a warm glow after being named Cinema Team of the Year by the Cinema Technology Council (CTC) at the end of November 2018, receiving this technical award, for which they were nominated by their peers, in recognition of the team’s expertise. Watershed is bucking a trend towards cutting projection staff: where multiplex cinemas now might only have one technician, Ewan heads a team of six, and they are being trained to do more than ever before.

“When digital cinema came about in 2008, the first thing that happened was all the 35mm just went out the door and all the digital projectors came in,” Ewan says, guiding the way down a couple of stairs in the near darkness, screens glowing and fans whirling as an audience of Watershed employees below us in settle in for an advanced screening of Sorry To Bother You with descriptive subtitles, ahead of a Deaf Conversations About Cinema event in a couple of days.

“We’ve still got projectors for 35mm, and 16mm, and we’ve actually got an 8mm projector somewhere as well,” says Ewan as we squeeze by a hulking metal Cinemeccanica projector, made in Milan. “What that means is our cinema curators and programmers can do different seasons, retrospectives, Sunday Brunches, and a lot of them involve 35mm.

“When we put it out there that it’s going to be shown in 35mm, that’s what brings everybody in. Sometimes the prints might not be in the best condition but that doesn’t matter to our customers: they want to still see it in 35mm. That’s added value and something you might not see in other cinemas.”

Not only are the team trusted to play these precious old prints – not all cinemas are allowed to borrow them in this way – but they even have equipment that allows a technician to alter the frame rate as they play, dropping right down to 16 frames per second for the oldest films.

“You can have these machines going for hundreds of years,” Ewan says, bringing out a photograph of the projection room as it was when Watershed opened in 1982, looking remarkably similar to how it does now. “Whereas, the digital projection system is like your phone or laptop. It has security updates and if something goes down inside it you aren’t necessarily going to be able to fix it. You are at the mercy of those electronics. But bar the odd tiny glitch, we’ve only had one outage in ten years in Cinema 1.”

Ewan feeds a length of test film into one of the pieces of kit around the projection room

An anteroom off to the side of Cinema 1 is stuffed full of blinking monitors, a mixing desk, lighting controls and equipment for editing packages of film for special events. “Back in the day we were projectionists,” Ewan says. “We’re now projectionists and A/V technicians.”

His team use broadcast-quality cameras to capture events and livestream them to other parts of the building, allowing bigger conference events to take place within the relatively small confines of the cinemas and break-out rooms. Yesterday they set up for a conference for 500 people, and within an hour of it finishing had turned the room around and opened a Q&A session for a visiting film festival.

Ewan has been at Watershed for 20 years, taking on his current role in 2011. Brought up in Redfield, he got his first job working part-time at the Showcase in Avonmeads while at college, and in his late teens joined the Watershed team. “I’ve seen Watershed change so much, but at the very core is that – I don’t know, if you could bottle it up, you could make a lot of money,” he says. “There’s something about it. And there’s a lot of people who have been here for a long time, and they are still going around all nice and happy. There’s a lot to be said for that.”

The changes in the role of Ewan’s team is something he has pioneered. “This is all from our own learning and research,” he says. “The trust is there from senior management for us to make those changes. We’re always trying to advance Watershed and what we do. I’m always coming up with ideas for how to improve, and how to offer something to our clients and customers. If we just stood still it would get stale.”

One of the two huge 35mm film projectors still regularly used in Cinema 1 

For Ewan, receiving the award from the CTC has been confirmation that he’s doing something right, along with the senior management who made the bold management decision to keep on and even hire more projection staff, even in the midst of the recession.

“The award is fantastic and it’s testament to everybody in the projection room,” Ewan says. “But really it goes deeper than that. It’s about the whole organisation. It’s great what we do and it’s fantastic that we’ve been recognised for that, but without the whole structure – absolutely everybody involved, every single department – then we wouldn’t have been up for an award.

“We try and do absolutely everything to the best of our ability. Showmanship is what showing films is all about. Anyone can have something up on screen, but is it correct? Is the environment comfortable? It’s all about the detail, and giving the customers something different; something so much better. It’s come a long way from just putting a film on. We use all the resources that we do to be able to put the best show on that we possibly can.”

When Ewan feeds a spool of film into a projector for a visiting film festival, or sets the latest big-budget new release playing, he’s thinking about making the experience one that is as close as possible to the one the filmmaker intended. “You’re the last link in the chain, ultimately,” he says. “Everybody that was making the film, everyone on set, the director, the financers, the producers, execs, actors, cast, runners, catering staff – absolutely everybody – it ends up here, being projected out of that porthole.

“If you think about it that way, you can understand why you should have a projectionist in every single cinema.”