Today I finally saw inside the Management School lecture theatre. Remember the one? The theatre that the university offered to OFU in place of LT-G but which was turned down, without consultation, by USSU on our behalf? Yes, that one. It’s nice. I think we’d have been very lucky to have it and we’d have […]
Article in The Atlantic Cities. Somewhat inevitably, small-town cinemas in the US are struggling with the costs of switching to digital. Nothing here we couldn’t have guessed / foreseen, unfortunately, although some of the survival strategies (crowd-funding under the banner “Go Digital or Go Dark”; pooled resources between independent operators) are novel. Similar article in […]
Positive Guardian analysis with some highly dissenting views expressed in the comments section – Why the University of Surrey is on the rise. Under the circumstances, it seems likely that this is a statistical quirk and consequently unlikely that Surrey that will stay in the top 10 for long.
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New YouTube channel for OFU!
When we started uploading old OFU films onto the Internet, we genuinely thought that YouTube would be a “flash in the pan” and that it would be cleverer to host our own. We were quite wrong. At long last, then, OFU finally gets its own YouTube channel. It will take a while to migrate the […]
Andy Ga., Dave T. and I took the opportunity to have a peek inside LT-G during the recent alumni event. We were delighted to find that we were as adept at moving about it in pitch darkness as we were a decade ago. The theatre has been completely refurbished in the last few years. The […]
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Surrey Alumni Day
This post is obsolete. The University of Surrey is holding their inaugural Alumni Day on Saturday 14th July 2012. Former OFU-er Jayne suggests an informal film society delegation to this event, presumably retiring for a £3.55 “crazy steak” afterwards. (Steak meals with all the trimmings are still £3.55, right?) Update: Apparently I wasn’t even close […]
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Premium cinema experiences
At OFU, we always tried to offer something a little bit extra. Knowing that we couldn’t compete on projection quality, and a lack of willingness to mop up popcorn, meant that we had to be a bit more creative in the service we offered our “customers”. We occasionally did fancy dress, and we invited the […]
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Spielberg loves celluloid
The Joy of Celluloid, an article in The Guardian about the artistic merits of film over digital. Cinematographer Dick Pope: “16mm is very much alive and well, and it’s crucial it remains so, yet its future is seriously under threat. Before too long, I fear it will be film itself that’s cast out, and in […]
Remember the Fumeo? How quaint and mechanical it was? Remember the switches, the levers, the “gentle” purr as 24fps passed through its gate? Remember the massive spinning wheels of death that you needed to use to rewind the film after the show? I’m sure we all know that cinema projection has changed a bit since […]
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Deluxe stops printing 16mm film
Interesting article in the Guardian highlighting the fact that the UK’s last 16mm processing laboratory has stopped printing to 16mm. (They currently continue to produce 16mm negatives and will, of course, blow up a 16mm negative to a 35mm print.) There’s also an interesting comment by “CaptainFook” beneath the article, on the state of 16mm […]