There’s a certain allure to seeing a movie outside on a nice summer night, whether it’s the nostalgia of drive-in movies or seasonal ambience. Recreate the experience with your own outdoor theater.
Dave Banks, writing for Wired’s Geek Dad column, saw an outdoor theater system advertised in a catalog and immediately started dreaming of recreating the magic of those outdoor movie experiences. The price for the small projector, screen, and two speakers was a whopping $3,500. He shopped around online, priced out components individually, but ended up still priced over $2,000 to buy speakers, a comparable projector, and a collapsible screen. He wouldn’t be worth his Geek Dad moniker if he didn’t follow up his sticker shock with some creative DIY magic. The first order of business was to scrounge as many parts as he could:
My company had a projector that – with a little work – could be repurposed for an outdoor event (and it had nearly 1,000 more lumens than the piddly projector in the catalog). The speakers could be borrowed from an audiophile friend and I dusted off an old receiver to drive the sound. Finally, the dvd player was disconnected from the kitchen tv to contribute to the cause.
It wouldn’t be an outdoor theater without an enormous screen however. The cheapest commercial screen at the size he wanted was over a grand. With some creative use of pvc piping, buckets, rope and cement, he built his own, shown in the picture above. The most important part, the screen material, only cost him $25. The total cost for the materials was $123 with an additional $125 spent on getting grommets and reinforcing stitches put in by a local awning company. Dave notes in hindsight that if he hadn’t been racing towards a memorial day unveiling, he would have done the grommet and stitch work himself and cut the cost of the screen in half. For more pictures of the build and some tips and tricks he learned along the way, check out full article below.
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