Making A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Eric Brevig is a special FX and stunt artist whose worked with Michael Bay and James Cameron on films from Pearl Harbor to The Abyss. He recently did an interview with about his work on the recently released Journey to the Center of the Earth, a reimagining of the classic Jules Verne novel.

Technology has come along way since Henry Levin directed James Mason in the 1959 movie about a group of explorers who discover Pangea, a verdant jungle ecosystem nestled beneath the Earth's crust. For the 2008 movie, Brevig used cutting-edge computer graphics to render the film's pre-cambrian environments. One of the most interesting parts of the interview is when Brevig explains how 3D digital technology allowed him to get almost instant feedback on scenes:

What we did is we had a full-size screen because I needed to see the imagery full size because our eyes don't scale down.

Because we were studio based, we took over an abandoned section out of… it was probably the cafeteria or something at one point, but it had a high enough ceiling. We installed a thirty-foot screen and two projectors, and that was a standing dailies screening room the entire time we were there. Literally, I could shoot at lunch, walk over with the tape and see it the same way the audience sees it, full color, sound, 3D, full size screen, judge all the issues, looking for eye strain, any problems in focus or whatever might creep into it, and call them back on the phone across the lot and say, "Okay, you can tear down the set, I'm done with it," literally thirty minutes after walking off of it with the actors. That was definitely the filmmaking of the future, and if you visited our set, we had a ten-foot screen in a tented area on the soundstage that was getting a live feed from the cameras so that guests to the set could come and sit in there with 3D glasses on and watch live while I'm filming what I'm doing.

Sounds like the kind of iterative development that was previously the exclusive realm of software developers. It's amazing to to see how movies are increasingly adapting the techniques of game design to bring virtual worlds to life on the silver screen.

[via ComingSoon.net]