Read More @HJ Reviews: Cotton Candy in 3D efrain gomez Previews: Trailer, Overview David Bruce, Webmaster Taking the Journey HJ Designing the World Below HJ Preparing for the Plunge HJ Storytelling in Digital 3D HJ Vaction Sweepstakes from Walden Media HJ

Special-effects films were a staple for me as I grew up just two blocks from the Lewis & Clark Theatre on Pacific Highway just outside of Seattle.  I remember “event” movies featuring everything from “Sensurround”—featured in Earthquake and Midway, among others—to “Smell-O-Vision”… and, of course, 3-D.  Oddly enough, I have no memory whatsoever of an effective 3-D experience as a child, though I’m sure I probably sat through at least half a dozen of them.

My first memorable 3-D experience came at Disney’s Epcot Center in Florida with Michael Jackson’s Captain EO, mostly because it was, well, you know: Michael Jackson.  But Disney didn’t really perfect the immersive 3-D experience until they launched Honey, I Shrunk the Audience—which incorporated practical effects, a trend they continued with Muppet Vision 3D and It’s Tough To Be A Bug.  The latter’s interactive experiences include getting poked rather sharply in the back, which gave me muscle spasms that almost ruined the rest of my vacation.  Disney, it seems, learned that 3-D just isn’t effective enough to stand on its own as an audience attraction.

Every decade or so, though, it seems that some outfit comes along touting new 3-D technology that will finally fulfill the promise of the format.  This year, though, we’ve had multiple new processes making that claim.  Just a few months ago, 3ality Digital was used to present the IMAX U2 concert film (which, for my money, was the first truly effective 3-D experience I’ve ever had), and now Journey to the Center of the Earth brings us the brand new, updated Real D format first used with Chicken Little.

Director Eric Brevig spoke recently in roundtable interviews about just how new the technology used in Journey really is:

We had to not only do it, but figure out how to do it—for the first time.  Luckily I have a very strong visual effects and 3-D background, so that wasn’t the hard part.  But what was really hard was: technically, the cameras were literally finished the week before we started shooting. … It’s astounding, if you know how the movie business works, that we didn’t have any problems; but we didn’t.

So it’s new… but is it effective?  It remains to be seen if audiences are thoroughly buying it, literally.  But star Brendan Fraser was certainly impressed during roundtables.

This picture is a broad-based, family-friendly, four-quadrant (to use executive-speak) picture that will do nothing less than entertain its audience.  Win lose or draw, if you like the story or if you don’t like the story, you kind of can’t hurt you with the fact that you are just thrilled by what you see.  And it’s not so much, for me, what you see but what you’re experiencing.  And the experience of this film is the star of the movie. … One of my favorite things to do when we introduce the screenings, as we have done over the country and overseas, is to sneak in and watch the audience watching the film.  There is nothing more satisfying that watching a five-year-old and a fifty-five-year-old, at the same time, reaching up to try to grab at the glow-birds, and the floaty daffodils—and to duck from the T-rex snapping at them!

One thing is for sure: with technology heading the way it is, we’re destined for more changes at the multiplex.  Fraser elaborates:

We’ve got digital projections systems that, frankly—love it or hate it—this is the direction we are going.  And I love film.  I still shoot my own personal cameras with film.  Call me old-fashioned.  I love it. I just do.  When the first day’s work was under way on Journey to the Center of the Earth, we shot the cave-in sequence, and you know, the dust settles and they drop a lot of sytrofoam rocks on us, and stuff like that.  And the normal cadence on set is that the first A.D. turns to the director—that would be Eric Brevig—and say, “Is that good? Did we get the shot?” He watched playback, he felt good about it, and he said, “Yeah, sure; check the gate.”  So the first assistant camera director looks at the camera, out of instinct, and he realizes: there is no gate.  Let me explain.  This is a digital-bodied camera with twin lenses—because we have two eyes in our heads—that mimic; we’re actually shooting two films at once.  And there’s no need for a gate.  Because a gate’s there when you work with a camera that has film.  It was like a bucket of cold water dropped on me!  It was a revelation.  Everything is different from here on forward.