Congratulations to Weta’s  Matt Aitken, Kevin Sherwood, Eric Reynolds, R. Christopher White for winning Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project at the 9th annual VES Awards on February 1st for their excellent work on ride film for King Kong 360-3D.

The film was up against some stiff competition including Universals other attraction that opened this summer, Harry Potter and The Forbidden Journey.

My wife and I had the good fortune of being their guest at the event, as a thank you for my part in the project.  It was a fun event hosted by Patton Oswalt and featured a Lifetime Achievement Award for Ray Harryhausen and the inaugural visionary award for Christopher Nolan.

The awards ceremony will be airing  Saturday, February 19, 2011 at 10p ET/PT on the REELZ Channel. So check it out.

King Kong 360 3D Audio Team mixing from the Tram. left to right, Mixer Pete Lehman, Sound Designer Brent Burge, re-recording mixer Mike Hedges, and Paul Cuoco

Mix Magazine has featured a new article called Beyond 5.1 that digs into the audio mix details of King Kong 360 3D with Oscar winning re-recording mixer Mike Hedges.  He discusses the unusual challenges we faced due to the opposing non perforated screens, and how they had to mock up the space at their studio in New Zealand to approximate the environment.

“We constructed a third-scale model of what the Universal soundstage was going to be, so we had screens on both sides of the room as opposed to where the screen normally is at the front.”

Mike, Brent, and Pete were a joy to work with, and willing to do what it takes to make something incredible.  I hope to get the opportunity to collaborate with them again in the future.  Check out the article here.

Completed astonishingly, in under two years, King Kong 360 3-D officially opens today. A unique collaboration between Peter Jackson and Universal Creative, the attraction transports you to Skull Island for a showdown between Kong and a V-Rex who’d like to make you dinner.

Stories and Reviews about the attraction:

• LA Times
• USA Today
• Hero Complex
• Yahoo! News
• FearNet
• Theme Park Insider

I spent most of the last two years developing, tweaking, and perfecting the immersive 3-D projection system for the attraction, that includes 16 2K resolution projectors, unique lensing, and 2 custom compound curve screens that stand 40′ tall and 187′ long.

The first challenge was deploying a 3-D film to guests riding in a linear tram.  This meant that most guests will be watching the film from an off axis position, a big no-no for most stereoscopic systems.  Not only that, in order to have image 360 degrees around the guests meant having screens opposing each other, which opens up issues of light contamination from one screen to the other, or cross-talk as it’s commonly referred to.

To solve these issues, I first mocked the system up, in Howard Hughes Spruce Goose hangar in Playa Vista.  Working with 3-D consultant Peter Anderson, and Electrosonic Systems , we fine tuned screen shape, texture, and gain to come up with a system that played to the guests off-axis viewing position, while mitigating the cross-talk.   The system was also used by Peter Jackson, Weta, and the Universal Creative team to view dailies and 3-D tests which due to the size and complexity of the system,  couldn’t be viewed any other way.

King Kong Mock-up System

Once complete we rebuilt the screens from scratch and moved the system to the show for integration.  In the last few weeks as we approached the finish line, Peter Jackson, Matt Aitken and the team at Weta outdid themselves creating an amazingly beautiful stereoscopic  short film that makes the experience. The original sound designer, Brent Burge and mixers Mike Hedges, and Peter Lehman mixed the 22 channel final audio in the space, which really made it come alive.

Now with all the technical challenges behind us, the attraction is open to the public, and the response has been tremendous.  Standing in the back of the space as guests cheer, scream, and applaud really is the projects best reward.  Eliciting that visceral, emotional response from the audience is what it’s all about, whether I’m making a film or an attraction.

To learn more about the project, I have embedded some behind the scenes videos provided by Universal, or you can watch them at the official website.