London Eye opens fourth dimension

Having brought in more than 34m visitors since it opened in 2000, the London Eye has become the UK’s top paid-for attraction. However, that does not mean the wheel’s owner, Merlin Entertainment, is resting on its laurels – it has just invested £5m in building a bespoke 4D cinema in County Hall, next to the attraction’s reception, ticketing and catering facilities.

Merlin is the second largest amusement park operator after Disney, so it knows a thing or two about running attractions. It also has the cash to back it objectives, and the theatre is part of a £12m investment programme that will see a new-look ticket office and a technologically advanced capsule on the Eye with Wi-Fi and mounted screens, all with a view to ensuring ‘the London Eye is offering the greatest quality visitor experience in the run-up to London 2012,’ says David Sharpe, Merlin’s director of London midway attractions.

The entertainment behemoth has used 4D in the past, and it has been central to the brief from the outset. As Sharpe states simply: ’4D generates an added dimension.’

With content paramount, Centre Screen Productions was appointed to produce a 4D film, with Dave Postlethwaite taking on the role of executive producer on the project, and Paul Kucharski its creative director. Centre Screen handed Principal Large Format the job of providing the stereoscopic 3D filming, and Julian Napier was brought on board to write and direct.

The team claims the resulting movie features the first-ever aerial footage of the capital in 3D.

From brief to screen

Centre Screen pitched for the job last September, and, after winning the brief in October, was given five months to write and produce the film. The brief stated that the film had to be less than four minutes long, and because the majority of visitors to the Eye are foreign tourists, it could not depend on dialogue.

Postlethwaite reveals that the initial brief was heavy on industrial detail, on how the Eye was constructed. However, a decision was made early on to create a more simple and direct story, with the technical information included in a trailer which visitors can watch in the new cinema’s foyer. The film itself is watched before visitors board the Eye, and is included in the ticket price.

The intention is to add value to the experience of seeing London from a rotating pod, as well as break up the waiting time for visitors with something entertaining to watch.

The focus of the four-minute film is a little girl and her father on a trip to London. Their view of the capital’s tourist attractions is constantly obscured by people, buildings and the general bustle of the city. Just when the girl’s visit is destined to end in disappointment, she is whisked away to the wheel by a seagull for what is literally a bird’s-eye view of London.

The purpose of the film, then, is to give visitors a foretaste of what awaits them when they board the ferris wheel, explains Napier. ‘It was paramount to set this apart from the typical adrenaline-pumping, bone-rattling 4D experiences one encounters at theme parks; that’s not to say those aren’t fun, but the London Eye is visited and enjoyed by infants, pensioners and everyone in between, all of whom have come for a serene and elegant flight above the city,’ he adds. ‘Our 4D experience had to appeal to the broadest demographic possible.’

An immersive experience

The film features 3D images of parties and events being hosted within the Eye’s capsules, as well as a reconstruction of London’s firework display on New Year’s Eve, a snowfall over the city, and aerial footage of the capital’s landmarks.

Once in the cinema, viewers are ushered onto a tiered platform and handed 3D glasses; as the film progresses, its 4D effects are timed to complement the on-screen action for an immediate, physical experience. So, during the snowfall scene, artificial flakes fall on viewers from above. When the screen is filled with bubbles being blown from a spatula, liquid globules drop from the ceiling; and when a large bubble bursts on screen, mist is sprayed across the theatre.

The floor rumbles to accompany a change in the weather, and a wind machine is deployed to help give viewers a sense of the shifting seasons.

In fact, the weather scenes provided the biggest challenge for the film makers. Because of the timing of the brief, the 3D filming had to be done during one of the worst British winters in decades – on several occasions the helicopter used for the aerial shots of London was grounded because its rotary blades had frozen over. What’s more, every aspect of the shoot had to be authorised by the Civil Aviation Authority.

Technical wizardry

Jeremy Braben, from aerial photography firm Helicopter Film Services, was given the task of building a gyroscopic helicopter mount that would carry the two cameras needed to produce 3D images. Phil Streather, chief executive at Principal Large Format, describes what was involved: ‘A special mount smoothes out all the bumps that occur when flying a relatively light aircraft in anything other than perfectly calm conditions. But there was no system that could take the cameras we wanted to use, at the distance we wanted to separate them, in order to achieve good 3D images.’

A bespoke solution had to be created, says Streather: ‘We developed and built a special mount that could take the two cameras necessary for 3D filming. We placed two Arri D21 digital cinema cameras 32in apart from each other, and filmed with 24mm, 50mm and 100mm lenses to achieve the finished aerial sequences.’

Building a purpose-built theatre is a luxury not afforded to most a-v projects, and, on this occasion, undoubtedly made life easier for the installer.

‘Having a purpose-built theatre for a 3D or 4D film is perfect because getting a film like this right relies a lot on the theatre geometry,’ Streather explains. ‘The distance of the audience from the screen, and the size of the screen itself, have an enormous impact on the experience. Knowing the exact dimensions of the screen and the theatre before we started production meant that we could craft a film that would perfectly fit the space.’

It is an ambitious project that is being given considerble marketing support, with a high-profile advertising campaign. With Merlin predicting the film will be seen by 3.5m people a year, at least all that hard work won’t have been in vain.

 KIT LIST

• 2 x Christie M series 10KW projectors
• QuVis HD Cinema player
• JSD80 cinema audio processor
• 3 x QSC DCA-2422 amplifiers
• JBL 4670d and 8340a speakers
• 2 x QSC DCA-1644 surround-sound amplifiers
• 7 x QSC cx404 four-channel amplifiers
• Renkas Heinz TRX-62H speakers
• 2 x glaciator x-stream fog machines
• 4 x chauvet LED strobes
• 2 x-band 300 LED lighting fixtures