My Pic­ture Palace – Can you build your own cinema?

Dur­ing these dif­fi­cult times, we are all hav­ing to make changes to our dai­ly rou­tines. You only real­ly start to com­pre­hend what true free­dom is when those free­doms are tak­en away from you – in this case, for a very just and vital cause. But, as humans, we have an abil­i­ty to adapt to what­ev­er life throws at us, and it’s in that spir­it that we offer up this brief to you, launched in part­ner­ship with our friends at Mod­ern Films

One lit­er­al and trag­ic upshot of the cur­rent lock­down sit­u­a­tion is that we can no longer enjoy a care­free trip to the cin­e­ma. Our TVs, lap­tops, tablets and any piece of home elec­tron­ics with a screen attached have tak­en up that man­tle – tem­porar­i­ly, we hope.

How can we bring some of the mag­ic of the phys­i­cal cin­e­ma expe­ri­ence to our own home?

Look­ing beyond the 65” OLED 4K Ultra HD screens and top-spec sur­round sound sys­tems, what are the lit­tle cre­ative touch­es that we can add to make our homes feel more like the cinema?

We’re chal­leng­ing our read­ers to con­struct their own Pic­ture Palace at home, and send us a pho­to­graph or video of the results.

Some thought starters…

– We want you to be cre­ative in how you ren­der your Pic­ture Palace; try and use exist­ing mate­ri­als in inno­v­a­tive ways.

– What are the small details you love about going to the cin­e­ma, and can you recre­ate them in a sim­ple way?

– Cre­ate an iden­ti­ty for your cin­e­ma: give it a name; make your own tick­et stubs; design your own movie sched­ule; make a movie watch­ing menu.

– Think beyond the con­ven­tion­al. If you don’t want emu­late the clas­sic look and feel of your local mul­ti­plex, then invent some new and excit­ing ideas for the col­lec­tive movie-watch­ing expe­ri­ences of the future.

– Your cin­e­ma doesn’t have to be to scale; we will also accept a mod­el or a diorama.

The over­all win­ner, as judged by our in-house team, will receive a two-year sub­scrip­tion to Lit­tle White Lies mag­a­zine, a selec­tion of LWLies brand­ed books and games, plus 10 films to stream on Mod­ern Films, 10 films on DVD, a film poster of the winner’s choice, and a selec­tion of mer­chan­dise. And to sweet­en the deal even fur­ther, our friends Joe & Seph’s are throw­ing in a bun­dle of deli­cious gourmet popcorn.

All entries must be sent to competitions@​tcolondon.​com under the sub­ject line ​‘My Pic­ture Palace’ by mid­day GMT on 30 April. You can also tag us on Insta­gram or Twit­ter using @LWLies, or with the hash­tag #myp­ic­turepalace

Videos should be no longer than 45 sec­onds and under 100MB, and pho­tos no more than 2MB. Please include a vis­i­ble copy of Lit­tle White Lies mag­a­zine or, if you don’t own one, just the words ​‘Lit­tle White Lies’ writ­ten on some­thing with­in your Pic­ture Palace.

Entries will be judged on inno­va­tion, orig­i­nal­i­ty and artis­tic vision. We will also be look­ing for the entries that best cap­ture the essence of the cin­e­ma-going expe­ri­ence. And there’s always added points for a bit of humour.

Final­ly, be safe! If you decide to break out the pow­er tools, make sure you take all the nec­es­sary precautions.

A word on our partners…

Mod­ern Films are a dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny that live up to their name: they cham­pi­on a diverse array of main­ly female direc­to­r­i­al voic­es, and have over the last few years amassed an envi­able cat­a­logue of titles such as Cannes prize-win­ner Hap­py as Laz­zaro by Alice Rohrwach­er, Crys­tal Moselle’s delight­ful teen movie Skate Kitchen and, most recent­ly, Haifaa al Mansour’s very fun­ny polit­i­cal com­e­dy The Per­fect Can­di­date. You can watch all these and more at mod​ern​films​.com

Terms & Conditions