Richard Mitchell, President, Cinema Technology Community (CTC)
THE GREAT news is that cinema is back, audiences are returning and box office revenues are recovering – with the recent UK figures for “No Time To Die” in particular proving to be nothing short of remarkable. We’ve proved the doomsday merchants wrong (again), cinema remains as resilient as ever – battered and bruised perhaps, but far from irrevocably broken. It remains to be seen how complete the global recovery is yet, however the indications are that the climb back is very much underway, with increasing momentum.
The CTC has, over the past 20 months, supported the industry in ways never previously envisaged as we entered the pandemic. From white papers, technical guides, videos, seminars and podcasts, our team has worked tirelessly to create a platform to educate, collaborate and inform the industry. We wanted to ensure that when the recovery commenced, our members would be in the best possible position from a technical perspective to provide amazing movie-going experiences once again. And the global community responded.
Our free Community Membership scheme saw our global membership grow to more than 700 members in over 70 countries, making CTC the world’s largest cinema technology trade organisation. This scheme will remain in place until the end of February 2022 (visit cinema-technology.com for details).
And as we emerge from the pandemic, CTC’s focus has now moved to supporting cinemas to ensure that presentation excellence remains a top priority. The team has been working on an ambitious project to provide a set of test materials for event cinema, to be rolled out over the coming months. We’re also revisiting our Projection Handbook to provide significant updates to this valuable resource and are actively pursuing the restart of our acclaimed training courses to help bridge the inevitable skills gap that’s likely to exist as a result of the pandemic.
But as the industry rebuilds, it needs to do so bolder, more diverse and better than before. Our commitment to diversity and equality in our industry remains strong and we recently recorded a second series of “Women In Cinema” interviews at CineEurope. In December we’ll be unveiling our 2021 award winners and to round out our Community Membership scheme, we’ll be hosting our second One Community Day event in February 2022 to, once again, bring together the global cinema community for a day of learning and networking online.
Join our cause
Behind everything that we do at the Cinema Technology Community is a passion for ensuring that moviegoers have the best cinema experience possible. If you share that ambition, please join our community today by heading over to our site: cinema-technology.com
