The film is almost finished with Dr. Phillips Sinedo of Orlando Science Center. The museum is moving into a digital age, with final reel-to-reel viewing scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.
The renovated eight-storey space will be equipped with an 8K full-dome digital projection system with a new dome-shaped screen, audio system, seats and up to 10 projectors.
Since the Rock Haven Park Museum opened in 1997, visitors have been able to see the huge reels of the film on the Ework Projector in a glass-enclosed climate-controlled room on the ground floor. The projector then slides 18 feet upwards and pops out into a place in the center of the theatre seats to begin the show.
“It was cutting edge in 1997 and is now a museum piece,” said Jeff Stanford, vice president of marketing.
Technology is advancing, and the Science Center is one of the last huge screen theatres in the United States that use films. This has resulted in restrictions on what can be seen in Cinedome.
“We’re now bound by what was made in the film, which means this format,” said theater director Amy Kessinberry. The film show is in the 15/70 format, showing a 70 mm film stock, twice the size of standard film. 15 shows the number of performances found in each frame, resulting in a higher, more immersive image.
“Unless you plan to pay around $120,000, you won’t have a new content creation, and you won’t have a museum that costs just $120,000 for yourself,” Kesinberry said.
The last film shown in Cinedome was “Living Sea,” a feature first exhibited 28 years ago, and “Everest,” a 1998 documentary narrated by actor Liam Neeson, costing $128 million at the box office.
The theatres and projectors have run better, although maintenance is more challenging, Kesinberry said.
“It was pretty reliable,” she said. “We had an igniter that needed to be repaired. The actual lamp needs to be replaced every 1,200 hours. The lamp alone costs around $6,000.”
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The new Griffyn Christie Laser Projector is “one of the topline projectors available right now.”
Kesinberry said she started out as a volunteer at the John Young Planetarium. She then launched Cinedome and was part of a team that remembered the first show of “Living Sea.”
“Then there are these crazy jellyfish,” Kesinberry said. “The next thing I know, I’m looking at this woman. I’m watching her dive into the water. And she says, ‘Yeah, this is all for science. No one should go where I go’… And she can’t stay there for so long.
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She then got a job at a company that set up planetariums and theaters, and took her to sites in Greece, Switzerland, South Africa, Egypt, China and more. One task was to add a planetarium to the 13th deck of Queen Elizabeth 2.
She returned to the Science Center in 2012, and the renovation will bring the planetarium show and laser light show back to the museum. The show, a distinctive feature of Orlando Life at the time, has been out of the lineup for about 10 years. The new surface of the laser projector and dome help the space achieve “pure black” for viewing.
“I don’t think it’s just a cinema,” Kesinberry said. “It’s actually a learning environment.”
The Science Center was targeted for a reopening next spring. Dr. Phillips Charity has made a $1 million donation to the museum’s unlock science campaign for renovations. The theatre is known as the Dome by Dr. Phillips’ charity.
The daily Cinedome movie schedules up to Tuesday will be “Dolphin” at 11am, “Living Sea” at 12:15pm, and “Everest” at 2:45pm.
For tickets or more information, please visit osc.org.
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