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Here's The Prototype I designed. I still have to upload the new facade drawings. What do you all think?

Here's the Main floor. It has the round box office, concession stand and room for 3 restaurants (A&W, Boston Pizza and KFC Esxpress in particular).


The is the second floor. There's an office with a Pepsi machine that vends reduced fare drinks for all staff.




More to come!

Ask questions please!

[This message has been edited by Andrew McCrea (edited January 25, 2002).]

Don't forget the Exit doors down by the screens. They always mess up a nice design. When we opened our 5-plex we thought we needed an 8-plex. Depending on your market you might need a 12-plex.

I have noticed with 25-plexes that the films are alway in more than one screen. So somewhere between an 10-plex and a 25-plex is the magic number.

What's your concession stand? You'll need about 8 stations for your 8-plex. Your lobby looks delightfully large compared to your aditorium sizes.

You could mirror flip your drawing and have a 16-plex. Since the lobby would now be much larger, you could add 2 more screens in that space and have an 18-plex.

What's the round thing in the middle?

I planned for 6 serving stations, plus 2 at Boston Pizza, 1 at KFC Express and 2 at A&W.

The regular concession stand is in front of the stairs up to the booth. The restaurants are the curved things. The round thing is a box office with 4 spaces that has a mini-lite show on top of it.

Could mesbur+smith draw up a quick sketch of how to add exit doors to all auditoriums, and make tiny mods with keeping it as an 8-plex?

Thanks

Andy

(Anyone) What would you change?

Andy

Where's the boxoffice and money counting room?

Do the auditoriums have center aisles? What is seating capacity of each auditorium?

There's actually a specuial room for counting money? Couldn't they do this in the office?

The little round thing in the middle of the lobby is the box office (drawing #1).

Starting from left-right, then across...
Cinema 1 = 450
Cinema 2 = 304
Cinema 3 = 234
Cinema 4 = 120
Cinema 5 = 120
Cinema 6 = 120
Cinema 7 = 120
Cinema 8 = 500

Cinema 8 has a 78'0" screen!

mesbursmith, can you tell me how it's poorly set up, the disadvantages, the advantages and anything else?

THANK-YOU!

Andy

[This message has been edited by Andrew McCrea (edited January 27, 2002).]

All of the ACT 3 Theaters designed buildings have a "money counting" room directly attached behind the boxoffice. I guess the reasoning is that they did not want large sums of cash transported thru the lobby and for pickup/drop-off of deposits/change with the armoured car company.

UA theatres used to have a pneumatic tube to shuttle the money to the counting room. Even our 5-screen has a money counting room which we used to great advantage last night when we were counting our record breaking $16,000.

Andrew, don't get screen envy. Sometimes a screen can be too big for a room. The image gets too large and looks grainy and washed out. The last theatre I was in with a 70-80 foot screen sat 850 and they never used the full width our height unless they were running 70mm. I'll also tell you that we can only sell about 300 tickets in a half hour per cashier. My largest screen is 300 seats I am not sure I want one bigger.

When I used to do installations we use to get a full set of plans for the theatre. They used to run 40-60 pages of full size plans. You should go to an architecture office to review plans; it will be educational. Perhaps your local planning office has something you can look at.

My plan has 115 pages!

Andrew

Your prototype design has a lot of merit! Here are some preliminary comments which I hope will help you.

Lobby: With a complex of about 2000 seats, the lobby needs to be way better organized to avoid confusion, congestion, and allow for adequate circulation and holding areas for patrons. I would recommend at least 8 ticket stations, and would prefer a "flow-through" arrangement (like supermarket check out counters) to speed up ticket sales and improve flow. Yes, there has to be a cash room connected to the box office. The arrangement of concession areas needs to be improved. The main stand is at a dead end of the lobby, so people can buy their tickets and go directly to the cinemas without ever passing the concession stand. This is a no-no. You have to force everyone past the stands. At the same time, there has to be clear areas to line up for food, while still allowing for entry and egress of patrons. You can't rely on the exits at each end of the lobby, because people are reluctant to go out in a direction different from where they came in. Main exit areas should go back through the main lobby, but segregated in some way so that they don't cross the lines of people coming in.

Auditoriums:
Exiting from the auditoriums which are sandwiched between other screens will be difficult, without compromising screen sizes. We have often taken the exits down under the screens, but you can't raise the screens too high. A simple solution is to raise the floor at the front of the auditoriums about 3 feet by ramping up from the lobby. This will allow you to exit down about 4 or 5 steps, go under the screen and exit at ground level. This is assuming you want stadiums. The objective is to get wall-to-wall screens and good sightline geometry. We have computer programs to generate our sightlines.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Mesbur+Smith!

I'm going to re-work these and I'll post them.

Andrew

I know you had e-mailed your plans to me directly, but I think it's better to discuss them in the context of the forum. That way, everyone else can benefit from the discussion. I'm looking forward to your next version.

mesbursmith

Thanks.

How exactly can I keep the same shape, layout and add the lobby changes like you suggested.

Andrew

You probably can't keep the same shape or layout. The form of the building has to grow out of solving all the functional relationships. It is dangerous to pre-conceive a building form and not be flexible enough to make necessary changes to improve the design later. Start from basic principles of traffic flow, functional relationships, etc. and develop the overall form from that analysis.

Every business has a "cash office". Remember, it needs to be very secure AND in a visible location (ie- not down a back hallway where the "lone gunman" can corner you without being noticed. Somewhere up front. The other benefit is that often management is working there and you can keep an eye on the front-end. One-way glass is common.

KFC and A&W are probably very do-able. Not sure, but Boston Pizza may be exclusive to AMC here in Canada, often food chains will sign exclusivity contracts.

All above is based on things I know of, below just advice as a movie fan. Check out the "cost per sq ft" thread in this forum. I want to caution you on the hype of "wall to wall" screens. My theory is that it is difficult, if at all possible, to match up "sweet spots" for picture and sound. It seems to render (evidenced by patrons refusal to sit there), the entire front half of the room. And, you can never go back. Picture the buzz on the street, "Yah, you hear about Famous, they've SHRUNK all their screens??!!" Like a lead balloon - BUT -they really should.