Pre-Show
by
Peter Knight
The pre-show has for years been 35mm slides, adverts and trailers. Often these slide shows are of adverts for local businesses or movie quizzes. Often the movie quizzes would full down as they were very rarely changed. In fact these pre-advert slides have pretty much now finish.
In the new digital cinema world, the opportunities have suddenly been opened up to make the pre-show more exciting. This could simply be better quality adverts for local businesses, more regularly changing quiz questions, too user generated mini movie clips.
Other technology can be implemented with the digital projectors to allow for audience interaction with adverts, as happened in 2007 with a car advert.
However, digital cinema is going to be both a challenge and an opportunity to the advertising companies as they have to continue to operate in a mixed economy for a number of years. However, hopefully the quality of the adverts seen should improve as there should be less need to blow up material which often has been shot on digibeta. There is a real opportunity for the pre-show of a film to be as creative and interesting as the cinema would like it to be. From ultra local adverts and messages, to games, additional content and quick change competitions. I think it is fair to see that this is one area of the new digital world which we will see change very quickly.
