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Originally Posted by officedweller
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Nice to see an update. I used to work at VIFF and actually organized the office move from (our) old location at Homer St and Nelson to the new facility. I liked working at the old building and left the org immediately after the move, so I never got to spend time there as anything other than a VIFF attendee.
The VanCity Theatre within the new facility was a passion project for the festival director at the time Alan Franey. He used his decades of connections in the local- and LA-based film scene to get the absolute best of everything and secure the various companies' A-teams to set up and tune the theatre. Proscenium Architecture, who designed the building and theatre, apparently spent as much time on the design and acoustics of the cinema as the rest of the building combined and achieved a level of acoustic perfection that would normally be used in a concert hall, as opposed to a small cinema. The top technical guy from the projector company came up to personally oversee and calibrate the projectors and the company gave VIFF an upgrade to their top model for the price of the mid-range. Likewise, the top technical guy from THX came up from LA to personally oversee and calibrate the sound system. The sound system was another good-guy upgrade from the various vendors and was wildly over-engineering for the size and resources of the project and was considered in the industry to have the best cinema sound system in the country when it was built. Same for the projection screen company; the best on the market and vastly discounted. Same for the lights and electrics, to make sure there was zero interference with anything. The cinema seats were just hilariously expensive. Like, picture the price of a new small car for each seat if you were to buy them retail. They would have blown the whole budget just on the seats if they paid MSRP. They were the absolute best available on the market and the same exact models used in Hollywood film studio executive screening rooms and were bought at cost from the manufacturer which custom built them for VIFF and had their top guy oversee manufacture and installation. On and on like that. Just a fantasy for film nerds, like what they'd talk about over beer as they daydreamed about their perfect cinema. And they did it!
The VanCity Theatre was the VIFF director's legacy project and VanCity the credit union provided $1M to fit out just the theatre itself, and thanks to the haranguing and cajoling of the festival director, the price for the fit-out would have been several multiples of that had discounts, donations, complimentary upgrades, etc., not been offered. That, or vastly inferior in quality had they stuck to *just* $1M to fit out a brand new screening cinema.
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