PhantomVault

We often see feedback regarding "it was smaller than I expected." Understand the actual size is posted in the title as well as the description. There should be no surprises on the size of items. Read the description and title COMPLETELY as we provide a lot of detail about the item in both places.

We do not offer custom orders nor do we sell the components separately. This is a hard rule as we tried this early in our business and it never went well. This means we will not sell the mats, film cells, etc, separately & will not "take a pic of all the cells we have available" as often we have 1000s of cells available & the sheer time it would take to just photograph them all would not make it worth the price of the display in labor.

We will not go into the entire nature of film cells (Google is your friend on this), but understand that these were originally made to be projected with a projector light. The reason we have the openings in the back are so that you can provide whatever backlighting you choose for them to be easily visible. If you can see a "film cell" clearly without light shining thru the back of it, it's not a real one. Backlighting is available at a number of places. You can see links to other places on our links.

This can all be answered in the description, but to clear it up more, what you see in the picture, that some people have decided is a "frame" isn't a frame, but a framing mat. These are what are used professionally in order to lay out multiple items in a frame. A frame is the metal, wooden, plastic, etc item that goes around the outer edges of the entire item. Due the fact that we would have to raise the item &shipping fees in order to accommodate frames, we have instead made the mats a standard 8x10 size. These will drop into most 8x10 frames without the need to buy a custom size. If you do not know what a framing mat is & costs involved in cutting openings in said mats, see for yourself with your local framing shop.

Often times, we do not get film for the entire movie. We will only have portions. Also, if we sat down with everyone who wanted it and had to go through the possibly thousands of cells we may have for a movie, it would be severely labor intensive (and that's if the customer decides to buy it at all). This would fall under a "custom order" and due to the sheer logistics of trying to do that at any sort of realistic volume, we would either have to charge an unreasonable amount for each display, or have to employ someone to do nothing but that. This is the same reason custom framing at a framing store can cost anywhere from 5 to 10 times as much as buying a frame off the shelf.

As with any seller, we do not reveal our sources as its taken us years to develop sources and contacts in order to obtain some of this film. To give you an idea, we've gotten it from several sources including ex-projectionists, antique picking, etc. This is a major part of our work and to just hand over all the information we spent money and time to gather would be extremely unfair.

First, one major reason is - our items are small and light. Not only would it cost more (which means we have to charge you more) to ship them via UPS or Fedex, you don't receive any real benefit as with things like UPS SurePost (which is their cheaper alternative for light and small items), they actually do the final hand off to USPS for delivery (which is why those items often show up in your mail box), so USPS is still part of the equation, but the tracking from them stops once they hand it off to USPS and therefore, we aren't able to prove final delivery in the case of disputes. Second, we have had tons of delivery issues early in our business when using them.

This is due to the fact that because of the sheer volume of our drop offs, we are forced to use "bulk drop off" rather than counter service like the average consumer. If we brought several hundred orders to our small post office, it would tie up the one or two people working for a long time and cause a huge backup (do you want to be the person behind us in line waiting?). Often, they can take a business day or two to scan drop offs especially lately due to the new postal policies, shorthandedness from the pandemic and anytime during a holiday season.

While we try to respond quickly, understand this is Etsy, not Amazon. We don't have a customer service department. The same people doing your orders are the same people having to answer your questions. Once we provide you with the information, we cannot continue to carry on a conversation/argument with you due to the fact that the more we are talking with you, the less we are making orders to ship out (including yours). Please understand that we aren't trying to be short with you, but this isn't a chat service. We are trying to provide optimum service for everyone.

We often have to respond to feedback that is left in bad faith by customers. Sadly, these days, many customers feel they can argue their way into either free items or think we have a magic wand with shipping carriers to force them to make their item move faster. You'll see that the overwhelming majority of feedback is good & remember that most of the time, customers are more apt to leave FB when something has gone wrong rather than when it's gone right. Etsy only lets us respond to feedback 3 stars or below so any customers saying we only respond to bad fb is right - bc we aren't able to respond to good fb. This feature is there for the specific purpose of being able to clear the air when a customer wants to try to do damage out of spite.