Fire on the Universal Studios Hollywood back lot in spring 2008 wiped out several movie sets, damaged the famous “Back to the Future” clock tower and destroyed the popular King Kong tram-tour attraction from the 1980s. It was decided to update the popular attraction by replacing it with “King Kong 360 3D” - an immersive, multimedia experience that opened July 1, 2010 and features a gigantic 3D projection system, with two screens 187 feet wide by 40 feet high within a football-field sized soundstage.
Passengers have their breath taken away in stereo when the tram pulls into Skull Island and they are engulfed by the Peter Jackson-directed battle of Kong and the dinosaurs. It rages for 92 seconds of consummate wraparound 3D imagery produced and animated by Weta Digital, Jackson’s New Zealand based company recognized with five Academy Awards for digital effects, most recently for Avatar. On Feb 1, King Kong 360 3D was honored with a VES Award from the Visual Effects Society, for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project.
Capacity is 160 seats per tram, with the show repeating over the course of the 10-16 hour Universal Studios day. The vehicle pitches, heaves and rolls as the beasts roar, punch, leap and lunge their way through battle in the jungle landscape. The show doors open and the tram emerges, its applauding passengers only a little worse for wear – slightly sprayed with Kongspittle. Tram ridership is up. Kong is back.
The facts according to Universal:
•King Kong 360 3-D features the world’s largest 3-D projection installation ever produced.
•Two seamless, compound curved screens, each measuring a massive 187 feet wide by 40 feet high - the equivalent of 16 movie theatre screens - surround the Studio Tour tram.
•If the digital 3-D King Kong could leap off the screen, he would be astoundingly large: 30 feet tall, 20 feet wide, 15 feet deep and 6,000 pounds heavy.
•Whereas the average film projects at 24 frames per second, King Kong 360 3-D’s 16 ultra-high definition projectors display 60 frames per second, creating an incredibly fluid sense of reality.
•Guests will see and experience the equivalent amount of media - one terabyte of information - that is usually rendered for one hour of a feature film.
Technical A-Team
Design, installation and control of sound and video systems were in the charge of Paul Cuoco, Technical Manager - AV & Lighting for Universal. His team within Universal included Senior Technical Manager Brian McQuillian and Technical Coordinator Drew MacDonald. Universal’s Technical Director Bill Whitcomb oversaw design, integration and control of the show action equipment. Among those Whitcomb worked closely with were Universal’s Greg Bryant (ride system specialist) and David Lundberg (Technical Manager – Controls).
Other members of the in-house team at Universal steering the project included Thierry Coup (SVP, Creative Studio), Jen Sauer (Creative Director), Mark Rhodes (Director of Media Production), Valerie Johnson-Redrow (Show Producer), Brian McQuillian (Sr. AV Engineer), Daryl Parker (Technical Manager - Special Effects), John Dunne (Technical Manager - Set/Scenic), Greg Burnett (Facility Design Manager), Rae-Mi LeRoy (Project Coordinator), Drew MacDonald (Technical Coordinator).
Noted Universal Creative VP Chip Largman, “The Weta Digital team including Peter Jackson and Matt Aitken, along with Sassoon Film Design and Park Road Post, not only created a great new King Kong 3D movie, they also played a significant role in the technical process and brought considerable expertise to the job.” The technical specialists interacted with Universal’s facility design team and the Weta content production team. 3D special venue cinema specialist Peter Anderson ASC provided input on system design as well as content design in the role of Stereoscopic Specialist/Projection Design Consultant. Additional outside providers included Creative Technology Consulting (Ben Sheldon, working closely with Whitcomb), engineering consultant Jason Taylor, Leff Brain Consulting (project manager Steve Leff), Electrosonic Systems Inc. (projection systems) Pro Sound (audio system design & installation) LA ProPoint (screen fabrication & install) Visual Terrain (lighting design & programming), AET (special effects) and Visible Sound (Peter Lehman, on-site mixer).
Paul Cuoco and the AV team
3D presentation is always challenging in terms of illumination, and this was a unique situation not only in terms of off-axis sightlines but also screen size and cross-reflection. Several CAD constructions in 3D were produced. “We came up with what we called the French Curve screen to deliver an acceptable amount of light to guests’ eyes and keep falloff to a minimum, ensuring that the projected world appears uniformly lit no matter where you are sitting on the tram,” Cuoco said.
Electrosonic’s project manager Linda Danet said, “Originally, the attraction wasn’t planned as 3D – and I first thought the suggestion of 3D was a joke. Honestly, this hadn’t been done before.”
“The creatives didn’t want to ever see the edges of the screen,” said Cuoco, “so we had to make them as tall as possible given the throw constraints.” In order to achieve enough height with the 16 Christie projectors, edge blended across the screen, they used anamorphic adapters, deployed vertically along the lens to stretch the image taller.
Cuoco described the content as “uncompressed RGB frames running at 60 frames per second,” which some readers will recognize as the signature frame rate of a promising but ultimately unsuccessful special venue cinema format, Showscan, with which Douglas Trumbull was closely concerned – and Cuoco reported having recently given Trumbull a backstage tour of the show.
We asked Cuoco to parse Universal’s statement that “guests see and experience an amount of media equivalent to one hour of a feature film.” He pulled out his calculator and responded, “The show is roughly 90 seconds. Take each of the servers – 16 servers each running a 90 second show at 60 fps and compare to an equivalent 24 fps show. That’s 86,400 frames, which comes to about 60 minutes’ worth of 24P content in 90 seconds. So yes, they had to produce an hour’s worth of CG in order to develop this show: 30 minutes per eye.”
The entire projection system was mocked up to scale and tested extensively in the former Spruce Goose hangar at Playa Vista Studios. A Medialon control system monitors all the AV equipment.
“The fullsize mockup at Playa Vista Studios was up almost a year,” recounted Mark Riddlesperger, founder and president of LA ProPoint, “and they played around with that mockup to finalize the geometry of the screen, do projection studies and sightline studies from the tram, and basically look at all aspects of what the show was going to be.”
“It’s a complex toroidal shape, which curves in 2 directions and makes you wish you paid more attention in geometry class,” says LA ProPoint project manager Andy Hanlen. “There was a lot of handwork, and a lot of trial and error and headscratching. “Universal built something that has never been built before.” The screen was plaster-finished and finished off with Screen Goo.
Sound, show action & lighting
A system of line arrays was deployed to create the sound field. There are additional speakers embedded into the tram bridge walls to allow for near-field effects like gravel. Two subwoofers per side supply substantial bass. “Since we couldn’t have a perforated screen,” noted Cuoco, “we couldn’t hide speakers behind it at guests’ ear height.” Sound design was provided by Park Road Post.
The pneumatic Kong motion base and automatic show doors were built to Universal’s specs by The Attraction Services Company (TASC). 10,000 gallons’ worth of air is pumped in and out for each show cycle. For sound isolation, the pressurized pump and exhaust lines are buried underground and there is a system of solid steel plates on top of the entire motion base, combined with a thick rubber skirt.
The lighting uses mostly ETC fixtures, provides a variety of environmental enhancements to make the experience more convincing and immersive, such as when the tram seems to be swinging from vines. “In an attraction of this kind, the projector is the brightest light source in room. We work to complement that but not compete with it,” said Lisa Passamonte Green of Visual Terrain.
Ordinary equipment in an extraordinary configuration
“One of the things that really amazed me,” observed Electrosonic’s Pete Tinari, “is what Universal created from very simple elements by thinking differently about those elements. Nothing like Kong has ever been done before, and even though the project is cutting edge, the technology it is based on is not - and it has brought us to a new place.”
“There were a lot of interesting logistics,” remarked Dale Mason, Universal’s Vice President of Creative Design. “We were very concerned at the beginning whether there was going to be enough time in 92 seconds to tell the story. We got so much more than we thought we were going to get. It feels immersive and complete.”
Reprinted with permission from Sound & Communications Magazine, published by Testa Communications www.testa.com.
