‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ Filmmaker Charlotte Huggins Had Her 3-D Epiphany

In the upcoming "Journey to the Center of the Earth," actor Brendan Fraser battles dinosaurs and other subterranean dangers in an adventure that has the action spilling right off the screen and into the laps of screaming moviegoers.

Nobody will be more thrilled to see audiences oohing and aahing at this three-dimensional world than Charlotte Huggins, whose own journey to make a movie of one of her favorite books began five years ago in a suburban Kansas City movie theater.

Huggins, a Los Angeles-based film producer, was in KC to visit her parents and had taken her two children to AMC’s Studio 30 in Olathe to see "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over."

"I remember walking out of the theater and banging my head on the wall because the awful anaglyph 3-D process they used for that film hurt my eyes," Huggins recalled.

"But at the same time I realized that the kids in the audience loved the 3-D. My own children loved it so much they went back to see it two more times.

"That’s when I knew that it was time to make a real live-action film in 3-D using the technology we’d been developing in recent years."

But the story is bigger than just one movie. Huggins predicts that within just a few years all animated features and most action/adventure movies will be made and shown in 3-D, giving audiences a new, compelling reason to get out of the house and buy a ticket.

Huggins is no stranger to stereoscopic (or 3-D) filmmaking. She’s been working with the ever-improving 3-D process for nearly two decades.

One of her earliest efforts was "Journey to Technopia," a 3-D interactive attraction for World Expo ’93 in Taejon, South Korea. The next year she debuted the 3-D "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience" at Disney’s Epcot Center. It has since been installed at Disney theme parks all over the world.

Since then Huggins and her nWave Pictures have produced numerous 3-D shorts — "Encounter in the Third Dimension,""Alien Adventure,""Haunted Castle,""S.O.S. Planet,""Misadventures in 3D" and "Wild Safari 3D." Several of her titles have played on the Extreme Screen at Kansas City’s Union Station.

"I got into this originally because I had a passion for IMAX 3-D and wanted to make movies for my own kids," Huggins said. "It was fun working with IMAX 3-D for a decade. It taught me a lot and prepared me for this new era of digital moviemaking."

"Journey," due in theaters July 11, marks Huggins first foray into the world of feature film producing. But even more important, she says, is that it is "the first digitally captured, digitally projected live-action feature 3-D motion picture."

As such it is making movie history and moving the industry closer to the day when digital 3-D projection becomes an everyday entertainment option.

Huggins recalled that in the wake of "Spy Kids 3-D" and her Kansas City visit, she set out to find source material that could make a great 3-D movie.

One of the strongest pieces she came across was Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was the source of a popular 1959 film starring James Mason and Pat Boone.

Learning that Walden Media already was developing a film based on the book, Huggins got to work convincing the folks there that the movie should be in 3-D and that she should be one of the producers.

"Walden brought me on board to develop the project because I already knew 3-D and I had an incredible passion for the story," she recalled in a recent telephone conversation from L.A. "I love the book. For the film we’ve modernized it, brought it up to the present day, but we’ve stuck with Verne’s story."

Technically it’s incorrect to refer to "Journey" as a film. It’s an all-digital production, and to see it in 3-D you’ll have to go to a theater equipped with digital projection equipment. (Flat, two-dimensional prints of the film will be shown at theaters without digital capabilities.)

"This movie was made possible by recent changes in 3-D technology," Huggins said. "It couldn’t have been done just four years ago. We were only able to make the movie with this schedule and this budget because we used digital capture. There’s no film involved at all. We shot it digitally, edited it digitally and will project it digitally."

Only the opening sequences of "Journey" were filmed conventionally. In fact, exteriors were shot in Iceland in the very location specified by Verne in his 140-year-old book.

"The minute the characters go down into the cave, though, we’re dealing with a totally imaginary world," Huggins said. "We built some enormous sets on sound stages in Montreal, but about 70 percent of the movie was shot against green screens.

"There were days when the actors were doing their scenes on an empty set. Except for the floor they walk on and objects they actually touch, everything seen in the finished film was computer-generated."

Huggins said she learned to respect her leading man’s ability to work with his imagination.

"Brendan is so good at this — just amazing. He can interact with characters and environments that aren’t there. I guess he learned a lot from the ‘Mummy’ movies, but it’s a real trick for actors to put themselves in an imaginary place and to be consistent for month after month."

"Journey" was shot using the same state-of-the-art stereoscopic cameras director James Cameron is employing for his upcoming science fiction opus, "Avatar." In fact, the creator of "The Terminator" and "Titanic" visited the "Journey" set to see how the technology held up in a working environment.

"Journey" got a huge response at the recent ShoWest convention in Las Vegas.

"We had 1,300 professionals in business attire laughing and jumping and reaching for the screen. People watching a 3-D movie duck, they reach, they jump back … and this was with a jaded, seen-it-all crowd. I sat next to Brendan, and he was like a kid laughing at the way people reacted to the movie."

Huggins’ second 3-D film of the summer, the animated "Fly Me to the Moon," opens Aug. 8. It’s the story of three houseflies who stow away on Apollo 11 and get an up-close look at mankind’s first steps on the moon.

"From here on out I expect all animated films to be 3-D," she said. "Animated films already are rendered in a 3-D world inside the computer. It’s a pretty simple thing to capture the second eye so that you can project it in full 3-D."

But what about theaters where 3-D projection isn’t available?

"I’d like to think that the technology is the least important thing about a movie," Huggins said. "After you’ve worked in 3-D for more than a decade, the mechanics aren’t that interesting any more. The story — that’s what’s important.

"We’ve previewed ‘Journey’ twice, once in 3-D and once in 2-D. And it scored as high in the 2-D version as the 3-D."

But there’s something about 3-D that just gives Huggins a charge.

"You know, I’d really like to make a thriller in 3-D. If you think you can scare people with 2-D, well let me tell you …"