TOWERING high above the sand at the west end of Warwick Long Bay is an extraordinary structure that is about to give Bermuda a movie-going experience like the island has never had before.

The big stars of the cinema will appear bigger than ever on a 50ft-by-20ft aluminium screen in front of outdoor audiences enjoying the spectacular scene this weekend.

House of Flying Daggers opened the four nights of Movies on the Beach last night. Nanny McPhee, starring Emma Thompson and Colin Firth, will be tonight's presentation, while there will be further movies showing on Saturday and Sunday night, all starting at 8.30 p.m.

Admission is free and food and drink will be sold on site.

The Bermuda International Film Festival (BIFF) has been recruited by the Ministry of Tourism to assist in organising the film line-up, the local marketing and in setting up the overseas crew that has come in to present the shows.

For Starlight Screenings, the US company hired by the Ministry to stage the event, showing movies in remarkable places is nothing new. But the logistical challenges behind their first venture outside the US have been even greater than usual.

Steve Tanney and Chris Giaimo own the company and they have staged outdoor movie shows on their giant mobile screens all over the US. Some of their more dramatic backdrops have been the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge.

They have been hired to stage movie premieres and their regular clients include Disney, HBO, Warner Bros, Fox and New York's Tribeca Film Festival.

Mr. Tanney and Mr. Giaimo had to make a couple of reconnaissance trips to Bermuda in the few weeks since the contract with Tourism was signed, to check the viability of the site and local conditions.

They arrived last Saturday, having shipped in four container-loads of equipment, plus a 1978 Airstream trailer, once a mobile holiday home for an American family and now the unlikely outdoor shell of a high-tech film projection booth.

Adding an extra challenge for Starlight's team of six was the fact that the road down to the beach had been newly resurfaced, so the big container trucks were not permitted to use it.

"That meant the equipment had to be taken out of the containers and reloaded into smaller two-ton trucks, before being taken to the beach.

"We spent the first day making a level surface on the sand to set up the screen," Mr. Tanney said. "The wind always makes it a bit more difficult and we have used about 50,000 pounds of ballast to hold the screen in place.

"Being on the beach, we were able to pump seawater straight into the plastic ballast tanks. We'll give all the water back when we're done!"

The screen is attached to a solid rigging, made of aluminium sections bolted together to form a huge L-shaped support. The screen itself is made from aluminium, an improvement on cloth-type materials used in the past.

"When the wind blew, the screen would billow and the picture would warp, as if you were watching it on a baseball," Mr. Tanney said. "Obviously that doesn't happen with aluminium."

Mr. Tanney is an experienced projectionist, whose family has worked in the movie presentation business for years. He has a good name in the business and his expertise has been used in production work for the likes of Spike Lee and Robert De Niro.

He will calibrate the projectors at Warwick Long Bay to ensure that the picture being beamed to the screen some 200 yards away is in focus and directed accurately onto the massive screen. He said it was standard procedure to run the film through two projectors simultaneously. Only one would actually be projecting, but if it hit problems then the other would be ready to allow the film to continue uninterrupted.

"The light needed to project an image of this size has to be very powerful," Mr. Tanney said. "We use a 4,500-watt xenon bulb, hand-made in Germany. These bulbs cost $2,000 and the projectors cost $30,000.

"The heat generated by the powerful light means the projector has to be water-cooled to prevent the film from buckling."

Mr. Tanney added that Starlight Screenings sometimes used a digital projector that cost $100,000.

The crew needs a substantial power supply and they have brought a batch of generators to the beach to provide what they need.

BASED in Engelwood, New Jersey, the company's early forays into outdoor movies were at the Bryant Park Summer Film Festival, in New York, in the mid-1990s.

Since then, the use of outdoor movies as a marketing tool has expanded Starlight's business and they have three big screens that are kept busy right across the US.

"The biggest crowd we've had was at the Washington Monument, when there were about 30,000 people," Mr. Giaimo said.

"We had to clear out of there within four hours, so we built a big screen into a 53ft container, so we could pack it up quickly," Mr. Tanney added. "It unfolds hydraulically and we would like to have brought it here, but Bermuda only takes 20ft containers. And they tell me it would have been too big for Bermuda's roads."

Mr. Giaimo said he could not reveal how much the company would be charging the Ministry of Tourism for the Bermuda performances. And he said cost differed according to circumstances.

"Every location is unique and has a different set of challenges, so the cost will always be different," he said. "Working to meet those challenges is one of the good things about the job.

Working in Bermuda had its advantages, said Mr. Tanney.

"It's a beautiful island," he said. "And we can take swimming breaks."