Germering, Germany—Apr 5, 2007
Kinoton Projectors Are Co-Starring in “Mr. Bean’s Holidays”
In “Mr. Beans’s Holidays”, the likeable though anarchistic character of Mr. Bean, alias Rowan Atkinson, roams the coast of Southern France. His exciting trip also leads him to Cannes where he visits the well-known film festival, leaving a lingering impression by breaking off a vain director’s boring screening and showing his own holiday video instead.
Mr. Bean takes care of the screening in his own and very special way: He simply sneaks off into the projection room, barricades the door and plugs his camcorder into the D-Cinema projector – in this case, a Kinoton DCP 70 Digital Cinema Projector. Then he just has to press a few buttons on the projector, and – voilá – the fascinated audience can witness Mr. Bean’s chaotic “Tour de France” on the big screen. How nice that even such a childlike mind as Mr. Bean’s can cope so easily with D-Cinema technology!
However, this plug-and-play principle is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance. Using a camcorder as content source for a DCP 70 projector is perfectly possible, provided that the projector is equipped with an adequate signal scaler featuring suitable inputs. Then even typical video signals such as S-Video or Composite Video can be correctly scaled and projected with a DCP projector.
The projection room showed in “Mr. Bean’s Holidays” was situated in the Studio de la Victorine in Nice and had been furnished and equipped by a technician from TACC, Kinoton’s French sales and service partner. The DCP 70 D-Cinema projector shared the projection room with a Kinoton FP 30 film projector. What looked a bit funny was that the 35 mm film simply ended up on the ground after running through the projector, instead of being wound up on a spool again. Maybe this setup should insinuate that the projectionist in the movie detests the film in question as much as Mr. Bean does. Anyway, this scene certainly does not reflect French projectionists’ typical way of working.