Talkin’ King Kong 360 3D

Talk about making lemonade out of lemons; Universal Studios Hollywood is making a banana split out of burned bananas with its new King Kong 360 3D attraction opening the first week of July.

The newest three-minute diversion for riders of the park’s iconic 45-minute behind-the-scenes tram ride Studio Tour features two giant curved movie screens (40-feet tall by 187-feet wide) facing each side of the tram and depicting a battle through the world’s largest 3D projection system that promises to appear as if it is taking place alongside and on top of the tram, with riders to feel as if they are right in the midst of the Skull Island jungle environment action with sounds, smells, water sprays (“dino slobber lobbers”), and wind, not to mention Kong, T-Rex and raptors all around them.

The first media preview is set for June 29 but 3DHollywood.net was invited to do a walking tour Tuesday (June 8th) of the newest and biggest Soundstage 51 on the Universal lot that houses the attraction (370′ long x 100’ wide x 70′ tall) and chat with show producer Valerie Johnson-Redrow about the groundbreaking show, the latest first-of-its kind 3D attraction at the park that also features “Terminator 2: 3D” and “Shrek 4-D.”

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The original King Kong attraction was one of the casualties of the massive four-acre fire of June 2008 that burned much of Universal Studios’ famous backlot. In a flash, the animatronic Kong with banana breath who terrorized New York’s skyline a few feet away from tram riders was gone.

But Johnson-Redrow, who previously developed theme park rides while at Walt Disney Imagineering, said that presented an opportunity to re-introduce King Kong in a much more technologically updated (digital) and immersive fashion, and one reflecting the most recent 2005 King Kong movie incarnation by filmmaker Peter Jackson.

In fact, Jackson was immediately on board to serve as creator of the theme park attraction that features all new film footage shot specifically for King Kong 360 3D for which effects were created by Jackson’s New Zealand-based Weta Digital. It’s the first Studio Tour stop that will require tram riders to put on polarized 3D glasses for a couple minutes, similar to the ones required to see a 3D movie in a theater.

“Our intention was to create an enormously spectacular and immersive 3-D experience and we’re pretty confident we’ve done that,” Jackson said in a statement, noting that the team believes the new attraction is “the largest, most intense 3-D experience on the planet.”

Jackson is the latest filmmaker to take a hands-on role in the creation of a theme park version of one of his movies, following in the footsteps of directors/producers such as James Cameron (“Terminator 2: 3D”), and George Lucas (“Star Tours” and “Indiana Jones Adventure”) and John Lassetter (“Cars Land,” etc.) at the Disney resorts.

Johnson-Redrow said Jackson was very engaged during the entire process on weekly phone calls and even choosing the scents of the jungle environment (but no bananas this time). The Universal production team even flew to New Zealand periodically to meet with Jackson in person.

“As a filmmaker, you’re hoping to have the audience step inside your movie and become part of the experience…to create the illusion of reality in a way that is much more tactile and profound than can be done in a cinema environment of a normal theatre. It’s only within a theme park attraction like this that you have the opportunity to do that,” said Jackson, who describes King Kong 360 3D as a kind of “mini-sequel or mini-continuation where King Kong and the dinosaur encounters another incident on Skull Island.”

In order to make the raptors and 35-foot tall creatures feel as real as possible, the digital production was shot at 60-frames per-second for more than double the visual clarity of typical 24 fps movies. That meant utilizing one terabyte of information and 90,000 frames of uncompressed media, roughly the equivalent of more than an hour of a 24-fps feature film film.

The movies are projected through 16 HiDef projectors, eight on each side, each emitting 30,000 lumens and simultaneously linked together with the image seamlessly connected.

In order to avoid having the light from the projector land on each of the opposing screens, producers positioned the banks of projectors above the screens so they project on a downward angle. The two seamless, compound curved screens are precisely curved—both in plan and in elevation—to maximize light return to the eye.

The nature of the 3D projection will allow every passenger to see essentially the same image, but each of the four tram cars that seat up to 48 passengers will get a slightly different experience thanks to the individualized compression systems underneath (as opposed to oil lubricated hydraulics are part of the effort to use “green” energy). For instance, when the 6,000 pound silverback gorilla and T-Rex appear to jump onto the canopy of one or two cars, those vehicles will be jostled separately from the others.

Bolstering the experience is a surround audio system consisting of 16 acoustic clusters, each equipped with 16 audio channels creating 108 decibels from 68 speakers, with audio effects by sound designer Brent Burge, who also created the voice of Kong in the Peter Jackson film.

While the giant new Soundstage 51 was being built over the past two years, a full-scale mock-up of the attraction had to be built and worked on in a giant soundstage 25-miles away in Playa Del Rey that was once a hangar used for the construction of Howard Hughes’ famous World War II-era Spruce Goose, according to Johnson-Redrow.

King Kong isn’t the only new element of the tram Studio Tour. An all-new four-acre backlot with New York building facades has been built to create new backdrops for TV producers and filmmakers, and each tram car has been updated with HiDef flat screens to allow the tour guide to show video clips pertaining to the ever-changing sets on the tour, including video comments by Jackson and other filmmakers.

— By Scott Hettrick