Tyneside Cinema Re-Opening

The Tyneside Cinema is one of Newcastle’s real treasures: it opened in 1937 to show newsreels and has continued as Newcastle’s only full-time independent cinema.  By 2006 the cinema was in need of major modernisation, as well as expansion; after securing £7m from various sources the cinema undertook it’s metamorphosis.

When the Cinema was ready to reopen it doors Filament were aproached to come up with some ideas to bring the building to life.

Our attention first focused on the cinema’s main facade: using light and video we animated the windows at night to start people talking and generate excitment. The lighting highlighted the cinema – which is slap bang in the centre of Newcastle – and the video projection eluded to the final preparations that were taking place inside with silhouettes of workers passing by the windows with ladders and painting window frames etc.

The second piece we created was focused on re-capturing peoples memories of classic films: using sound bites and music mixed together into a sound scape which emersed the listener into a world of forgotten memories. linked to lighting strung across the alley, the piece engulfed the audience in an emersive Audio Visual experience.

The final piece was part of a series of works we have done looking at the hidden art of film making - by deconstructing the moving image. It was a video piece in partnership with Daniel Shiffman, a New York based Artist and Lecturer. The piece deconstructs film down to it’s constituent frames and then plays them out as a filmstrip  across an massive screen showing 1500 frames of video on screen at once.