Petherton Picture Show News

David Hall Refurbishment

When the new Autumn 2009 season opens, PPS, like the rest of you, will be agog at the marvels crafted during the David Hall's summer 2009 refurbishment. Part of this refurbishment involves moving all of PPS's technical equipment to a new location, which should result in a more professional appearance. However, those of you who are entertained by the visits of Mr Cockup to the PPS evenings need have no worries. We are sure that he will continue to be a regular visitor, at least until we have sorted out all the bugs entailed in moving all our clobber.

Film Programme

Surprisingly, the choice of films for Petherton Picture Show is not as extensive as one might believe. PPS is dependent upon a small number of suppliers to provide the films we show for our members, and there are supply problems with some of them. As a result, we sometimes withold making a final choice of film until we know we can confirm its availability. In consequence, we sometimes do not know all the films in the forthcoming season, and we have to put in a "place marker" or "TBA" into the programme.

PPS apologise for this, but it is beyond our control. We can only update this web site, and announce the film titles at film showings, when we know what they are.

Future Programme Film Suggestions

The Petherton Picture Show committee choose the films for each season, using their judgement as to the type of film that would be well received. If you have any suggestions for films to go into the next season, please feel free to pass them on to the committee members. However, we make no promises - remember that each season only consists of a small number of films, and this must be balanced against their likely appeal and availability.

PPS Funding

The Petherton Picture Show committee is always trying to obtain funding from the National Lottery and other sources, including the occasional raffle (ie: anywhere we can scrounge money from) to enable improvements to be made in the following areas:

• Visual Projection Equipment - Thanks to a grant from the UK Film Council (wonderful people, with such good taste), PPS has now acquired a (new and improved) projector. You may have noticed the improvement, since (a) it is three times brighter than the old one, (b) the picture is sharper, and (c) the projected picture actually fits on the screen properly. This very lovely (and pricy) bit of kit was three quarters (slightly more, actually, but who's counting) paid for by the UKFC grant, the remainder of the cost being paid from our own funds. It was just in the nick of time, as we had noticed that the old projector, which has had to be repaired in the past, had developed strange ideas about how to project colours. This caused some panic amongst the committee, and we had to borrow another projector.
  The old projector will be repaired and kept as a backup if required.
• Sound System - Our original simple stereo sound system has now been replaced with a more sophisticated sound system capable of taking advantage of the digital sound formats that come with films supplied on DVD. Now that we have the new front centre speakers, we're pretty darn pleased with the end result (preen, preen.......), and there has been a BIG improvement in the clarity of speech from the soundtracks.
  (All the same, we can't control the quality of sound on the DVD, and occasionally some have quite poor soundtracks, which some of you have commented about. We do our best.)
  We have also hard-wired the hall with permanent speaker wiring, which, apart from being more professional, also gave us the opportunity to improve the wiring standard. As a result, it now takes us less time to set up before each showing, and the sound quality has racked up another notch. (God, we're good)
  Nevertheless.....
• Loudspeakers - The loudspeakers currently in use are a bit of a mixture. Some belong to Petherton Arts Trust, some to the Council, and some to the local resource centre. It is true to say that none of them were designed to be used to broadcast cinema sound. If anyone has any decent quality speakers they no longer want, please consider donating them to us, and thereby support a local arts facility.
• Amplifier - The centre channel (which broadcasts the cast voices in the digital sound from DVDs) was until recently powered by a separate (and very old) stereo amplifier. It was woefully underpowered, and also had accumulated a few oddities over its life. It finally died just before one of our performances, and we have now replaced it with another much better (and more powerful) amplifier. Hopefully the mightily improved quality of the voice track will be noticed by someone other than us - although usually all we get is moans, and requests for subtitles with American soundtracks. Still, we can hope...