Last night we showed School of Rock at Friendship Park. About 30 minutes before the end of the movie we began to see lightning off in the distance. Several of our volunteers have iPhones and pulled up the local weather radar showing an approaching storm cell. We prepared in case we had to cover up the electronics in a hurry and prepared for a record setting strike (Packup). We were able to complete the movie while the lightning got closer.

The strike was under 30 minutes last night with just a few drops falling on us before we left. Thankfully, again, we have the trailer which is much better than an open bed pickup in a storm! We were home before the heavy stuff had a chance to hit!

Phew!!

Yesterday we picked up our new Haulmark Trailer from Wasko’s Automotive! We are very excited as this saves us a TON of work every night we do a movie. We don’t have to load the truck and car at the beginning of the night and unload everything at the end of the night (which usually has been around 12:30am). Literally, it saves us about 2,000 lbs of work.

The trailer could also serve as a projection booth for questionable weather nights giving us a bit more flexibility when making the weather call to go or postpone keeping the main system components in the trailer.

We will be working on the trailer to customize it to our needs and plan to add a custom vinyl wrap for “Season 2 - coming to a park near you!” Come back and keep an eye out for pics!

We are making progress and have come a long way as far as blog look and feel. We plan to put pictures and video from each of the movie nights up on the page for that movie night. So far, there are pictures up from Goonies, Night at the Museum and Bee Movie and a quick test video from Fairview Park for Bee Movie. We plan to take more pics/video as we go along.

Check out the pics and video to see what your missing!

We also updated the calendar function with a better plugin. It appears in the sidebar on the right as a list of the next couple events. You can click on each event for more info. You can also go to our calendar page for a look ahead at future months presented in a calendar format.

The last thing we need to straighten out for now is the “Masthead” or header up top. It’s going to be a rotating bunch of pictures with the masthead text. Gotta get it to line up right as well!

Thanks,

AG

Maybe you can help us, think for a second back in time, do you have any pictures of Fairview or Friendship Park from days gone by? Did you go to Fairview School? Did you play at Tank Park. If you have some pictures we could use, we will give you a byline on those photos and FREE movie tickets…to the free movies in these parks.

Seriously, we want to gather some info on the past days of summer from Fairview and Friendship (Tank) Parks. Take a minute and look through those old albums or shoe boxes and let us know if we can scan those shots.

Update! A big shout out to Mark Atkinson and the BASD for supplying the photo of Fairview School below. Fairview Park used to be Fairview School. I think most of the school still rests below the macadam and (correct me if I’m wrong) the reason the macadam is up above street level is the size of the rubble pile below!

Well, we have done 4 Movie Nights at 4 different venues so far and I wanted to bring up the topic of where to sit. We have 5.1 surround sound. That means we have 5 speakers plus a subwoofer that pumps out the real low bass thumping stuff. Most of the dialog comes from the center channel speaker in front of the screen. Most of the rest of the sound comes from the front left and front right speaker. The 2 speakers about 100 feet back from where we project are the surround left and right. They are only playing something when there is a surround effect going on. The sound sweetspot is within this circle of speakers.

We place orange road cones on the speaker wires for safety so people don’t trip or ride bikes over the cables (Bad bad thing!) You are welcome to sit anywhere you like. You can sit in front of the projector, you can sit behind the project, you can sit back in the grass if you want, it’s all up to you. Just don’t park a chair right on top of one of the speaker wires. Other than that, enjoy the show.

Our screen is a front projection screen and we must be between 31-42 feet away with the lens we are currently using. Like I said, you can sit in front but please stay off the tarp.

 Movies Games and More is a project of the North by Northwest Neighborhood Initiative (Elm Street). It provides a social event in the neighborhood parks for people to come out and get to know one another and build a sense of community. The movies are FREE, bring your own lawn chair or blanket events. There will be 5 nights in Friendship Park and 5 nights in Fairview Park before we move indoors for the winter.

Fairview Park is located at 4th Avenue and West Market Street. Movies will be held on the second Thursday of each month through October. Friendship Park is located on East North Street about a block off Linden Street. Movies will be held on the second Wednesday of each month through October. We will start our pre-show programs around 6pm and show our “Feature Presentation” when it’s dark enough. Please see the pages for each park on the right and the pdf flyer available at the bottom for the full schedule.

It’s called Movies Games & More for a couple reasons. Movies are the main event of course but that’s just the start. “Games” include both on-screen Playstation3 and Wii Games as well as games and other programming we may have prior to the “Feature Presentation”. An example here would be Spirithoops - hooping for fun and exercise.

The “More” is about other programming we will bring to the parks for people in the neighborhood. An example here are the programs from the Bethlehem Health Department like Sun Safety, Immunizations, Nutrition, Fire Safety etc. Some projects in the works are plant swaps, tool training stations, cleanups etc. Watch this site for updated information about other programs we add as we go.

So come out, bring the family and a blanket or lawn chairs. Enjoy lots of hot dogs, popcorn and other refreshments brought to you and benefiting the Blockwatch groups that cover these parks.

Local Business Owners - we need your help! Please see the Title Sponsors Needed Page. Great opportunity to get your name out and support our neighborhood project. 

Here’s a PDF with this season’s movies. Print it and put it on the fridge!

[Show as slideshow]

Enjoy the Show!

A.G.

P.S. Please silence your cellphones!