Premise: Building a good anime viewing environment for our Japanese culture club Sakurakai.
Background: (A bit long, you can skip this if you want, I just need to vent some resentment here
) Our club started (under another name) 2002, the activities back then where mostly the same as they are now (watching anime, playing go, learning japanese) but they took slightly different forms back then. Anime viewing consisted of renting a projector and borrowing a locale maybe once every 2 months. Fast forward 4 years, we now have a small room (3x4m) in a local youth activity house where we weekly watch anime on a 30" TV...
Fast forward another 2 years, we move into a larger room and buy our own projector. It's a huge step up from the TV but the room itself is not very good nor is the screen. Here is a picture of how it looked like:
Fast forward another year (it's now summer 2009). The municipal decides that it can no longer afford to sponsor this youth activity house that's been going for over 20 years. It been unique in that it has been run solely by the youths without adult supervision for all those years (youth here is set to be anyone under 25, people older than that (like me) can only be support members). The municipal has another adult supervised youth activity house they want people to use instead and they don't want to pay for both, and they want to sell the house.
So we are told we have to move out before new year. BUT there are enough backlash in the newspapers about this that they have to promise to keep supporting the youth house groups to enable them to move into another place. Their yearly contribution for rent is reduced from 81.000$ to 27.000$.
So we are forced to move to a new place and decide to use that opportunity you upgrade our facilities a bit. We quickly occupy the best room in the new house and go work build a real anime cinema.
Plan: New screen, black cloth covering all walls/celing, 3 rows of sofas with back rows raised to allow free sight.
Quick Sketchup plan for the new room made before starting the work:
2 different views of the new room before starting the work:
Execution: First we get the raised gallery in place. They are actually for building stages but work fine for our purpose. First row will be at floor height, second 30cm up and third 60cm up.
Then we assembled the screen. It's a Kingpin 131" fixed frame 16:9 screen with velvet covered frame.
We then mounted the projector (an Optoma HD65 DLP 720p projector). Our projector mount had been damaged while moving so we first tried do without one. The result was not very good.
After spending 2 hours trying to get it to lie flat we gave up and went to buy a new projector mount. More easily said than done, not a single store in our town had one in stock so we had to go to the neighboring town. Took 2 hours before we got back then another hour spent assembling and adjusting the new mount for a total of 5 hours just to get the projector up on the wall. In the end the result was good at least.
Time to start putting up the cloth. 30x3m of special scenmolton cloth normally used for stage building. It's sound and light absorbing and can be used over windows to blackout incoming light. All of this while still being very thin and light (330g/m2) and flame resistant allowing it to be used for building construction.
Almost done. There are still a lot of details left, the back of the room haven´t been done yet because we need permission from the landlord to remove the phone switch and the parts that are left of the room-divider (the glass windows behind the projector).
We also need to paint the bookcases black (they will house our manga collection) and as seen on the picture we also need to get new sofas. Sadly we didn't get as much money as we hoped from the county council so we don't have any budget for that at the moment... Long term we also want to put in a wall-to-wall carpet.
The bookcases will be painted today and we hope to finish the back of the room on friday. The premier will be on saturday. I will get some more picture then to finish this up.
Conclusion: All in all it has been a very fun project. While not everything has been perfect the result is still way above our exceptions. Total cost of the project are around 3.500-4000$, that includes the projector and sound system we bought last year. We have been given 1.700$ in contribution from external sources (half from an adult educational association and the other half from the county council) and the rest are member contributions.
Our mascot Afro-Ken watching over the work
