Montreal: The latest screen adaptation of Jules Verne’s fantasy Journey to the Center of the Earth, filmed most famously in Twentieth Century Fox’s 1959 version, is getting the 3D treatment.

Meteor Studios has stepped out of its 2D comfort zone and entered stereo filming for the locally shot Journey 3-D, starring Brendan Fraser, produced by Walden Media and to be distributed by New Line Cinema.

Meteor is the primary vendor for environments on the $55-million flick, and the shop is building miles of models, textures and props to create the subterranean locales in the epic adventure.

But 3D VFX is a completely different beast to 2D, as Meteor well knows. The studio brought on additional tracking artists and created new proprietary tools to solve puzzles with projecting depth on film.

Bret St. Clair, Meteor’s special effects supervisor, says there are widely used cheats in 2D, but in 3D, these shortcuts don’t exist. Tracking must be extremely tight, and if a character needs a CG item such as a headlamp, it has to be placed at the exact same depth as the actor.

‘Things like this would have broken the system before, but we can now, with experience, visualize potential problems,’ he says.

Rotoscoping and paint are big challenges as well, he says, because in 3D viewing through polarized glasses, the viewer’s two eyes are each viewing different parts of the action, but have to be in sync.

‘If you roto a wire or paint out a wire, not only do you have to create it for one eye, but recreate exactly the same thing with a fraction of a pixel offset for the other eye,’ he says.

Since moviegoers’ 3D experience depends on how far they sit from the screen, Meteor created a screening room with a couple of ‘very expensive’ projectors and a 23-foot screen to preview the theatrical experience audiences will have when the film is released in summer 2008.

www.meteorstudios.com