3-D and How It Works
So what makes 3-D movies so exciting? We'll let Brevig explain: "It feels like you're really there. That's the difference. You're not watching an image projected up on a screen; you're actually experiencing it like you're in the room with the characters."
(By Sebastian Raymond -- New Line Cinema)
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"Journey to the Center of the Earth," which will be in theaters Friday, is a 3-D movie. Now, three-dimensional movies have been around for a long time; ask your parents or even your grandparents. Early 3-D movies always seemed a bit fuzzy and likely to give viewers a headache. But get ready to see a lot more 3-D at the movie theater. Because movies are projected digitally now, rather than on film, it's much easier to use the cool, in-your-face technology.
Director Eric Brevig has been interested in 3-D since he first saw it as a kid. Ellen McCarthy asked him to explain how it works and how he used it in "Journey."
Step 1:"I'm using a specially built device that houses two camera lenses side by side -- just the way your eyes are side by side -- and they're each recording their own image. So we actually finish two complete movies. . . . Every frame of film has a matching right-eye and left-eye picture."
Step 2:"What we do is, we edit the movie in one eye and then when that's edited, we match up the other eye so that the two are perfectly matched up. And then we project [both] with two projectors, so that the whole thing is 3-D."
Step 3:"When you go to the theater, [the movie] goes into a projector that has a special adapter that projects one image for one eye and another image for another eye. And you wear special glasses so that each eye sees only the proper movie. If you take the glasses off, you'll think it's blurry, but in fact you're seeing two images on the screen at the same time. They're not exactly superimposed; they're side by side." The glasses, he said, pull the images together in your head.
