Willow Creek 12: Harry Potter and the Interlocking Adventures

As Harry Potter fans flooded the lobby and fun insanity broke loose for the managers and employees last night, a different kind of insanity was happening upstairs in the projection booth. Master Head Projectionist Dave Hilsgen was prepping to run three 35mm film prints of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II in nine auditoriums.

It's a process known as Interlocking, where you can thread up several projectors by only using one film print. It's an amazing sight to see. Of course with digital projection taking over many cineplexes, interlocking may end up being a thing of the past. Sure, if we ran the "film" digitally, we'd upload the 200GB of Deathly Hallows Part II movie information onto the server and move it around to the auditoriums we need it in, but that's no fun.

There are risks when running interlock, but everything always runs smoothly (99% of the time -- last night we had a brief audio hiccup in #8) here at Willow Creek when it's done. Why? Because of Dave. He used to run this type of set up many years back, even at Willow Creek in the early and mid 90's, before the market became so saturated with the amount of 35mm prints actually produced and before hundreds of movie theatres were popping up everywhere. In fact, last night was the first time since the mid 90's that Dave interlocked projector #1 and #2.

Enough of our teasing. Here is what we did last night:

Harry Print #1 -- Interlocked between projectors 1 and 2
Harry Print #2 -- Interlocked between projectors 3, 4 and 5
Harry Print #3 -- Interlocked between projectors 7, 8, 9 and 10