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The last days of summer kick off film festival season with three of the major festivals—Venice, Telluride, and Toronto—all coming one after another, and Dolby is there to support each one.
“Film festivals are very important to Dolby,” says Dolby Institute Director Glenn Kiser. “We’ve been supporting some of the major festivals worldwide since the 1970s. It began for us with the need to support our filmmaking partners by providing technical support to make sure their films were presented properly. Over time, we’ve also seen that festivals are a great place to engage filmmakers early in their careers, and to encourage them to think more creatively about sound and picture as storytelling tools.”
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Venice: Sala Darsenal (courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia)[/caption]
The Venice International Film Festival got off to a rousing start this year with the opening of the largest Dolby Atmos® screen in Europe, at the 1,400-seat Sala Darsena auditorium. Started in 1932 as the world’s first film festival, the Venice event has been held annually since 1935.
From August 27 through September 6, filmmakers, actors, cinema industry representatives, journalists, critics, and film lovers from around the world took part in screenings and special events on the Lido. This year’s festival encompassed screenings of 55 feature films and presentation of both official awards and collateral awards.
The Telluride Film Festival, the smallest of the three major festivals, is a gem high in the mountains of Colorado. Unique among festivals, Telluride announces the festival lineup only on the day the festival opens. Though cinephiles have no idea what they will see, they are drawn to the festival’s reputation for strong curation. A mix of advance screenings of studio pictures, eclectic foreign films, documentaries, and retrospective screenings attracts a small but dedicated crowd of industry heavy hitters and film fans. This year’s event took place from August 29 through September 1.
At Telluride, Dolby works alongside Meyer Sound and Boston Light & Sound to convert facilities like a middle-school gymnasium into a state-of-the art screening room. A large indoor ice-skating rink transforms into the brilliant 650-seat Werner Herzog Theater, which made its debut in 2013 at the festival’s 40th anniversary. In addition to loaning cinema servers to play the films, Dolby sends three engineers to Telluride for three weeks to set up the venues, fine-tune the sound and picture, and make sure that every screening goes off without a hitch.
“In many cases, this is the first time these directors are showing their new films to an audience,” says Kiser. “When the Dolby trailer plays before the start of each film, it gives the filmmaker and the audience the assurance that they’re about to experience a great presentation, with fantastic picture and sound.”
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Audience members at a screening (photo credit: The Toronto International Film Festival, Inc.)[/caption]
The Toronto International Film Festival, in some ways the antithesis of Telluride, runs September 4 through September 14. Expected to welcome 400,000 attendees this year, Toronto has in the past decades become a major launchpad for autumn film releases that may go on to find not only box office success but Oscar® gold. The festival plays out across 30 screening rooms around the city, and Dolby is on hand to provide digital cinema servers for each of those theaters.
It’s a massive job—when you go to your local cineplex and watch a film projected digitally, that film has been loaded onto the local server in the projection booth, a process that can take several hours. But that’s only one movie, which might stay on the server for a few weeks as the film completes its theatrical run. At Toronto, every film playing at a specific screen during the entire 11-day run of the festival is preloaded onto the Dolby server in the booth and checked to ensure a smooth-running festival with no hiccups.
“You’ll see the Dolby logo at each of these festivals alongside those of other sponsors,” says Kiser. “But we really see ourselves as festival partners. We’re there before the first screening begins to make sure the presentation is going to be fantastic. We stay through every late-night movie to make sure every film plays without a problem. And when the festival is over, we’re the last ones to go home, knowing that we’ll be back again the following year for the next festival.”
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