Drat, I wrote a response to this but my session timed out and I lost it. I had some outpatient surgery Monday, so the Percocet may appear here in the way of rambling or inarticulate comment.
Thanks for the comments, good and bad. Are we happy with how things turned out? Yes. Are we ecstatic? No. Clearly, there were issues -- both foreseeable and not -- that I could have responded to more quickly. Mea culpa.
I want to note that none of the problems you saw/heard/felt had anything to do with Bruce and Joe. They were organized and ready to go.
Dennis wrote:
Chaos seemed to be the order of the day. I think a lot of this is the result of a not fully finished theater.
I would agree in general. Jen and I were putting in 18+ hour days trying to get things finished up, but it just didn't happen. Zeke and others came over to lend a hand when they could, but once a couple of construction items -- and the seats -- fell behind, we were in "mitigation" mode.
Dennis wrote:
It was what it was. I was really hoping the theater would be a little further along. I realize the seating was not Dave's fault. I always sit in the middle and get in line early so I never tried out the other seats. The "regular" seats were fine.
I know others may take issue with this, but the metal folding chairs are reasonably comfortable. We used these for the Manhattan Short, and I've been using them as office chairs -- sitting for 12 hours at a time in some cases -- and if I had any doubt that they would be reasonably serviceable for the marathon, I would have gone out and bought several dozen couches on Friday. Jennifer and I are grateful that attendees were willing to "live" with them for this 'thon.
Dennis wrote:
Big thumbs up for the bathroom. It was always clean, and while the regular hand towels ran out, there were always paper towels of some sort to dry your hands.
These -- the bathrooms -- were #1 on our list of things to have done for the marathon. Given the makeup of the marathon audience, eel may still have to swap bathrooms in the future. A lot of effort went into figuring out how to fit more capacity in each side, and I think they worked out better than we expected.
Dennis wrote:
Also the lights reflecting off the top of the middle urinal hardware make what look like alien eyes on the wall. Fortunately I don't get bothered by that kind of thing and thought it was cool.
Heh, I noticed this when they finally put the light fixtures in. I had the same thought -- "cool".
Dennis wrote:
The decorations were very nice, the advantage of not having everything done, it was probably a bit easier to so some of the things they did.
I was bummed, because we could have done a big mural on the back and front walls of the auditorium. Stuart Gordon said we should leave the theatre the way it is. Maybe we'll just hang Austrian curtains along the walls that we can then retract for the marathons.
Dennis wrote:
The "concession stand" can only get better. For some reason, I have no problem paying $5 when my soda comes out of a fountain, but when I see it come out of a 2 liter I can buy for $.99-$1.39 it is more troubling.
Yeah, this was sub-optimal. We only did it because that's how CAPA does pop at their remote stations. Since we don't have a our permanent food license yet, our only other option would have been a portable dispenser which would have limited us to just a couple of flavors. Thanks for buying pop just the same. All the money we brought in for the marathon is going directly to concession equipment.
Dennis wrote:
But back to the concession stand. The folks working it were very nice, but the line seemed slow. I think a big part of it was the lack of the fountain. … Peanut but no plain M&Ms. … It did seem like the line got a bit quicker in the evening, maybe it was just shorter or maybe it was the young woman that came in to work.
The lack of a fountain was a major time killer. As for the candy selection, we asked Gold Medal for their top selling items. I guess -- even though it's an obvious oversight -- regular M&Ms didn't make the cut. Though the Mike & Ikes apparently sold well. The lack of space at the stand was a definite contributor to lack of selection, candy-wise. Thankfully, several people who have worked concession stands -- including for marathons -- showed up later in the day and got the stand organized. That really sped it up. Jen was acting as Stuart Gordon's "wrangler", so she just ended up not having enough time to get the stand together. Thank goodness for Holly, Anna, Beth, etc.
Dennis wrote:
Related to the concession stand, the pizza was good and the ordering, and the fact we could customize pizzas, was great. My friend doesn't eat beef so usually I am stuck with cheese pizza, but we were able to get half pepperoni and half pepper. I hope they are the regular suppliers.
Cowtown did a great job and I really liked the sliced sausage they used. Mmmm. We'll look at adding some of their other items, like stromboli, etc., for next year. We'll also come up with a system for notifications of arrival. Text messaging maybe. Or a flashing pizza beside the screen.
Dennis wrote:
The projection also will get better. I hope. It really wasn't that bad, focus and framing issues were resolved quickly. The sound issue in From Beyond took a while to resolve as did the Blue Ray issue with I Sell the Dead. In general it just seemed that the breaks were long and it seemed like, perhaps unfairly, that it was the booth.
I think you could fairly say it was the booth, more specifically, me. We got the projector serviced on Friday and a new bulb installed. We're a little concerned about the lamphouse, so once I ignited the lamp for the first show, I let it run for the whole 24 hours. It was awkward working around that. The one thing that worked perfectly was our new Kinoton spool tower. That is one slick piece of kit. I've nicknamed it "Sputnik" because of all the pieces that stick out of it.
And I want to make sure that everyone knows how much help Dave Zecchini and Brian Berry were in the booth. I sort of "press ganged" them into helping.
Dennis wrote:
Temperature was good. Got a wee bit warmer around From Beyond but then got better.
One of the things we did during the renovations was have the thermostats in the auditorium swapped out for remote sensors, with the controls in the booth. Joe would text us when people noted environmental problems, so hopefully this helped keep it relatively comfortable.
Dennis wrote:
Oh, sounds seemed to bleed in from the lobby I assume when the sound stuff is up on the walls, that will be reduced.
It's also possible part of this was from the booth. Once we get our ports in, that will block the booth noise. As for lobby noise, most of the sound attenuation material is already up. The back wall of the auditorium, and the entire outside of the new projection soffit is encased in a product called QuietRock. The soffit also has multiple layers of sound batting in it. I suspect the lobby noise you were hearing was actually just coming through the doors. We're going to be replacing these with self-sealing acoustically quiet doors. That's about all that can be done.
-David
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