Page 66 of Summer at Croftwood Cinema
‘No problem, boss,’ she grinned, picking up a tray and a cloth.
‘Hey, thanks Toby,’ she said to him as she cleared his back-log of coffee mugs and gave the small bit of table the wasn’t taken up with his laptop, phone and current coffee mug a cursory wipe.
‘No problem,’ he said with a smile, taking out one of his earbuds. ‘I’ll file the evidence of service with the court and everything will go into motion. I’ll keep you posted.’
‘Great.’ She stood there looking at him before she realised she’d been stood there smiling like a loon for what seemed like minutes. He was smiling too, with an amused twinkle in his eyes.
As soon as the rush died down, Patsy and Oliver left Jack to it and headed to the cinema to meet Hayley, one of Ed’s colleagues from the Film Society, for their first lesson.
‘I’m a bit nervous,’ Oliver said, as they waited for Hayley by the front doors.
‘Don’t worry. It seems very methodical to me. I think I’m going to make a cheat sheet of steps so we can refer to it until we know what we’re doing.’
‘Okay, good idea.’
‘Think of it as a slightly more complicated coffee machine, if that helps.’
‘Now, that I can do, but if I mess up a cup of coffee I’m only disappointing one person, Pats, not a whole cinema full of people.’
‘Make sure you’re listening and you’ll be fine. We’re in this together.’ She held up a fist for him to bump which he ignored, looking at her like she was from another planet.
Hayley went through the whole thing twice, using the Star Wars trailer which was still the only piece of film they had. Patsy made a thorough step-by-step guide. Or at least she hoped it was thorough.
‘Okay, who’s going first?’
‘I’ll go,’ Patsy said, realising that Oliver was still looking like a rabbit in the headlights.
She laced the projector, checking that the frame was square in the gate — the most important thing — and that the tower was on so that the film didn’t spew out of the projector all over the floor, which was another most important thing. She screwed her eyes up as she turned on the lamp, expecting it to choose that moment to explode but it didn’t, then she turned on the projector and waited for it to get up to speed before she opened the shutter to let the light through. There were pictures but no sound and the picture was wibbly along one side.
‘Oh. That doesn’t look right,’ said Oliver, peering through the tiny window at the screen.
‘Do you know what you did wrong, Patsy?’ asked Hayley, sounding like a teacher.
‘Um, no.’ Patsy was trying to control the frustration she had with herself for getting it wrong and would rather Hayley just came out and said what the problem was.
‘I know!’ said Oliver, looking as if he might start bouncing up and down with his hand up. ‘It’s back-to-front so the sound isn’t being picked up by the light thingy.’
‘Exactly,’ Hayley said. ‘Remember, the three lines on the edge of the film need to be towards you so that the sound optic can read them.’
‘Right,’ Patsy said gloomily as she turned everything off and rewound the film - something she had remembered how to do - before cheering up once she realised it was know-it-all Oliver’s turn. ‘Your go, Ollie.’
She watched him lace-up the projector, making a big show of checking the film was the right way around this time. But when he started it up, there was a snap. The film had broken and was churning up in the projector before Hayley stepped in and quickly switched everything off.
‘Okay, so when you laced around the sprockets, Oliver, you needed to leave a couple of fingers worth of a loop of film so that it has room to move. It was too tight and so that’s why it snapped.’
‘Oh my god,’ said Oliver, as he took a length of damaged film out of the projector. The holes on the edges had broken and the sprockets had pierced and creased the frames of film. ‘This is the only thing we have to practise with and I’ve ruined it.’
‘No harm done,’ Hayley said and proceeded to chop out the damaged section and tape it all back together again. ‘Count how many I’ve taken out,’ she said, handing the damaged film to Oliver.
‘About twenty?’
‘Okay, so one second of film is 24 frames so we’ve cut out less than a second. You’ll barely notice the difference. Right, Patsy, your turn again.’
‘Oh, man, this is stressful,’ said Oliver.
‘It’s not, it’s fun,’ Hayley insisted, as they watched Patsy lace up again.
This time it was perfect.
