The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

DAYTON -- The Liberty Theater is preparing for the end of an era. As the film industry replaces 35-millimeter film with digital technology, theaters have been upgrading to digital projectors to keep up with the times and this includes Dayton's restored Liberty Theater.

Liberty Theater Manager Kirsten Schober said the transition will require a costly new projector, which all together will come with a price tag of $69,450. Recent donations have made the projector within reach.

Initially the Touchet Valley Arts Council had been quoted $120,000 for the new projector, former council treasurer Mar- cene Hendrickson said.

"Thirty-five-millimeter is the past," Schober said. "Film studios have been talking about this transition to digital for a while. The council thought they had until 2015 to raise the funds for a digital projector, but several film studios said they were switching to digital by the end of 2012."

With the news of the expe- dited upgrade date, the council also learned the projector would cost about $50,000 less than they had originally be- lieved, Hendrickson said.

With all of the donations collected since a fundraiser was started two years ago, the theater is now just $5,000 away from its final goal with one month to raise it, Schober said.

"Our hope is by mid to late August we will be able to make the transition," Schober said. "It just amazes me how much we are able to get done in here. Many companies stepped up and supported the change."

"It's wonderful that we've had the response we've re- ceived," Hendrickson said. "Or else we would be sitting and not able to get most of the recent productions."

The Liberty Theater, located on Dayton's Main Street be- tween Second and Third streets, was renovated in 2001 by the Touchet Valley Arts Council, an independent non-profit or- ganization.

Since the renovation, the theater has been showing fam- ily oriented movies four days a week and a foreign film dur- ing the Fourth Friday Foreign Film events, according to the theater's website. The theater also hosts live performances by the Touchet Valley Arts Council Productions and the Missoula Children's Theater.

The film industry's acceler­ated timeline put pressure on the council to come up with a lot of funding for a new projector very quickly. The council received generous gifts from companies including Puget Sound Energy, Columbia REA, Pacific Power, Columbia County Foundations and many community members, accord­ing to a press release from the theater. But the donations were not enough to cover the entire upgrade. So for the second time since the theater started renova­tion more than 10 years ago, the board turned to the Sherwood Trust.

The Sherwood Trust, a pri­vate non-profit foundation founded by Donald and Vir­ginia Sherwood in 1991, dedi­cates funding and support to improving the quality of life for people in the Walla Walla Valley from Dayton to Milton- Freewater, Ore., according to the trust's website. The council approached the trust with a funding request and was grant­ed $36,500 toward the project, Schober said.

The change in projector will bring a more effective and mainlined version of the Liberty Theater, Schober said. Assembling and breaking down 35-millimeter film to be shown, shipped and stored is costly and time consuming and the film is heavy, she added. The switch to digital will allow everything to run from a hard drive so em­ployee time isn't spent cutting reels of film apart and putting them back together again, which causes a loss of frames over time.

Hendrickson said the switch to digital will also save a lot of money on shipping costs.

The new digital system, which will be a Barco digital cinema projection system, will allow the theater staff to play with and upgrade sound op­tions, Schober said.

For more information or to donate to the digital upgrade project, visit TheLibertyThe­ater.org or e-mail info@liberty­theater.org.