John Vincent
Does anyone remember working with it?
I was scared of it and never went near. It wouldn’t get past Health and Safety today!
The operator looked as though he had mutated from all the dodgy emissions coming from it.
Dudley Darby
Yes, I had to sit by the thing in the TVT circle a couple of times on “This is Your Life” with the only instructions:
1. Adjust that knob to keep the picture bright, but not too bright or it clears itself
2. If it catches fire, switch it off!
The one in the Theatre was never terribly reliable. Often went into a long smear of oil which gradually cleared as the disc rotated
Alan Taylor
I remember doing an OB of the BAFTA awards where a (possibly B&W) Eidophor projector was used with a massive back-projection screen on stage.
We had everything set up well ahead of time and the Eidophor was expected to be troublesome, but also worked first time and only needed minor tweaks. I can’t remember if the BBC Micro computer was provided by somebody on the crew, the projection people, or a graphics person, but it got plugged into the Eidophor and was running the space adventure game Elite.
People who played Elite might recall that it used wire frame vector graphics and that one important manoeuvre in the gameplay was to match the rotation speed of your craft so that it could safely dock with a rotating mother ship. With the computer temporarily set up on the stage right in front of what must have been at least a twenty-foot screen, the images towered above the player in a most impressive manner. It seemed as though you were piloting something out of the 2001 Space Odyssey movie. Much fun was had by crew members with this biggest video game ever. Then somebody fed the audio to the PA system, which boomed out massive explosions and other sound effects. That was the point where the Stage Manager thought that people were having too much fun and it had to be stopped.
Pat Heigham
Here’s a description of how the Eidophor worked.
I remember a large screen BP in the TVT. It was displaying the ‘London to Brighton in 4 Minutes’ film for the theatre audience, before mixing through to telecine for transmission. I was driving a Vinten motorised and tracked in to frame up and fill the screen, couldn’t help but lean into the curves as the train barrelled through!
Pinewood’s Theatre 7 (now the John Barry Theatre) and the cinema at the NFTS are equipped with digital projectors which I have used to great effect for the AMPS AGM’s.
Large screen projection has always fascinated me ever since seeing “South Pacific” in CinemaScope in the fleapit cinema in the Isle of Wight.
That initiated a desire to work in movies and on a musical. I got my wish, much later.
William Nuttall
Eidophor: Fantastic bit of Kit!!!
Wikipedia Entry for Eidophor.
Wonderful smell of Hot Valves, Diff Pumps etc. Site Includes pics of the COLOUR EIDOPHOR!!
Barry Bonner
As we are talking about back-projection, I found this amongst my “archives”. In the RH corner are the initials J.T.F. anybody know who this is?
David Taylor
We used an Eidophor on all the London Weekend TV sit-coms for many years, and it had been retained from the Rediffusion days at Wembley. It was positioned centrally amongst the racked audience seating at both Wembley and then at the South Bank after the move.
I’m fairly sure that LWT only ever used a black-and-white model though, and after colour was introduced it stayed, but was always accompanied by many hung Sony 24″ TVs for the audience to view. We in sound obviously had to hang our Pamphonic (Wembley) and the R.G. Jones 100v line speakers ‘around’ it along with the audience mics.
The Eidophor ‘hummed’ unfortunately and mics were kept away from it because of that. As the very interesting video that William has found points out, it was surprisingly robust in normal operation, for such a complicated piece of kit. However the operator started line-up whilst we were still rigging each time.
Paul Thackray
Lime Grove used a colour one for the original Breakfast Time, for the weather. The Top Of The Pops set used a mix of Colour and B&W up until the set change for 25 years anniversary in 1989. These were looked after by the specialist scenic projection department (who were disbanded in the early 1990s)
