Open Air Cinema at the Los Angeles Film Festival

Inflatable screens prove to be the best solution for outdoor film festival screenings

Los Angeles is a city that believes deeply in spectacle, so it makes a certain kind of sense that it would also believe in watching movies outdoors. Preferably in large groups. Preferably on very large screens. In this spirit, Open Air Cinema was pleased to produce the outdoor screenings at the LA Film Festival, where audiences gathered in impressive numbers to sit in the open air and do what Los Angeles does best: watch itself reflected back through cinema.

The film selection covered a commendably wide emotional range. Viewers could immerse themselves in The Filth and the Fury, a documentary about The Sex Pistols that is as subtle as its title suggests, follow it with the elegant earnestness of West Side Story, or settle in with The Incredibles, which manages to keep both children and adults happily focused on the same glowing rectangle. The open-air venues were packed, proving that people will cheerfully sit outside for hours as long as the movie choices are good and the screen is impossible to miss.

One venue, in particular, offered a quiet lesson in the evolution of outdoor cinema logistics. The night before one of Open Air Cinema’s productions, a different outdoor screen had been installed. It required six staff members and two and a half hours to put up a 30-foot-wide screen—a respectable effort, no doubt, involving ladders, patience, and possibly mild regret. The following night, Open Air Cinema stepped in. Two staff members fully set up and secured a 40-foot-wide inflatable screen in under 30 minutes. At that point, the comparison was less a debate than a conclusion.

In screen terms, there was no looking back. Inflatable screens, it turns out, really are the best solution—faster, bigger, and requiring far fewer people questioning their career choices halfway through installation.

Source: OpenAirCinema.us