"Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey" 2020 Update

Rob Murphy at the editing table finalizing “Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey"

“Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey is an Australian feature documentary exploring the single greatest upheaval in the history of the film industry; the cessation of capture and projection on film. Now ten years on from this momentous transition, film maker & projectionist, Rob Murphy shares his personal journey to find out what has really happened to film.”

Splice here: A Projected Odyssey is not a title I chose for it’s hyperbole. This documentary has been an odyssey for me in every sense of the word. Beginning as a knee jerk reaction to the beginning of the digital rollout in 2010, I began filming what I thought would be… well, - I didn’t know what it would be back then but as a film maker and projectionist I felt compelled to capture and preserve what was happening and disappearing quite quickly. The Sun Theatre in Yarraville (my projectionist home) was the first complex in the Australia to go fully digital, so I had the drop on all the madness as the rest of the industry began. I borrowed a camera and began running from one de-installation to another, making many friends along the way; all with compelling stories to tell. If somebody had of told me I would still be making this film ten years later and that I would have shot eight terabytes of footage across Australia, the U.K and the U.S, I may have backed away. As with many passion projects it started small and evolved into something which became part of the very topic it was exploring. To then style and mould something this personal, (yet dear to so many) into a narrative on screen has been one of the greatest creative challenges of my career.

This hybrid documentary / drama can best be described as a love letter to film; both the medium and the art form. A journey that began for me as a boy watching wide screen films on the family’s black and white tv in ‘pan & scan’. I used to think that squashed title sequences and clunky mechanical pans were a creative style of the film making of the day. Luckily for me the Melbourne repertory circuit still had access to good prints and a handful of surviving cinemas that could run them. Seeing those same wide screen films in 70mm with 6 track magnetic sound was a revelation. It was here I first realised that tampering with a films presentation had a huge impact on its visual syntax which brings us to one of the corner stones of the documentary. If film is an art form then what would be considered the genuine article or the original experience? Shouldn’t the recording medium be inseparably intwined within that art work? Like the canvas a painter paints on? Many many projectionists, film practitioners, industry luminaries and countless others have given their time (both on and off screen) to make the comparisons, drive home the facts and reveal the surprises that make this film a two and half hour cineramic (yes, that’s not a typo) roadshow ride through the projected film experience, told mostly from the projectionists point of view.