COMMON PEOPLE is a film shot entirely on Tooting Common in South London.  The film weaves together six stories and over thirty characters to present a dramatic, humorous and sometimes magical tale of romance, crisis and adventure on one of London’s luscious commons.

Co-Directors Kerry Skinner and Stewart Alexander have lived beside Tooting Common in south London for over ten years: "We walk there every day, it's an essential oasis in the city; somewhere to de-stress, and recharge. It was on a walk across the common that we came up with the idea for our film, COMMON PEOPLE.”

The film has won several awards including the Independent Spirit Award at the Sedona International Film Festival and the ReelHeART International Film Festival.  It was also nominated for Best Narrative Feature at the St Louis International Film Festival and was described as "A sweet and huge-hearted story of London life" by Guardian Film Critic Danny Leigh.

As the film is set on Tooting Common and many of the local residents acted as extras for the production, the directors wanted to arrange screenings in the Tooting area for local people.  They approached the venue, The Bedford, which agreed that its Globe Theatre could be used for these local screenings.  But despite being a large theatre, it did not have a high resolution projector powerful enough to be suitable for the screenings.

It had an unusual size of screen (3m wide by 2.3m high) and the projector needed to be sited 8m back behind the stalls.

An Optoma EH7700 projector was chosen for the installation due to its outstanding brightness of 7,500 ANSI lumens and because it produces pin-sharp high definition imagery through its WUXGA resolution. It was installed with the ProScene TZ1 (long) lens which has a throw ratio of 1.93~3.71:1 and a 1.9x zoom.  This makes it incredibly flexible for installation in a wide variety of venues from theatres, lecture theatres and museums and meant that it could be sited more than 8m from the screen without any compromise to image quality.

The projector was installed behind the stalls at 1.69m high so that there would be no chance of shadows from the audience obstructing the picture.

It carried the audio feed from the projector via HDMI to the theatre’s existing sound system.

Three screenings were held through the day, with the evening performance completely sold out to a packed theatre.  The audience loved the film, recognising key landmarks from their local area.

Kerry Skinner “We were delighted to be able to bring the film back to the borders of Tooting Common where it all began.

“The imagery was absolutely perfect. We are delighted with how natural the colours looked from the projector and although the projector is clearly very powerful it was not noisy at all.”

COMMON PEOPLE is available on DVD from Amazon.co.uk and can be downloaded from: iTunes, Google, Blinkbox and Amazon online.

Image copyrights © Common People