Frantic even built two screening rooms for the film in Vancouver and Winnipeg so it could play back everything in 3-D.

"We looked at the various ways we could composite the show," Shand explained. "We considered having the second eye auto generated through advanced scripting, which would require some additional artist tweaking in the end. However, very early on we received some test footage to play with. We found that our compositing package Eyeon Fusion could easily handle the memory requirements of compositing both eyes simultaneously.

"We also found that if we paired the eyes into a single image, that it made managing all the elements far simpler for the compositor. So, if you were to apply a color correct blur or whatever, it would be applied to each eye evenly, and at any time the shot could be rendered no matter what the state and screened in stereo. If a stereo problem was found, then it was very quick and simple for the artist to find the problem in the flow, since both eyes remained together the whole way through.

"This was very important because our actors were surrounded by CG rain and splashes, and so a lot of work went into seating everything into the right stereo depth. We created a variety of custom tools within Eyeon Fusion that gave us the ability to view the shots in anaglyph stereo at any stage in the composite. This gave the artists the ability to assess their shots in stereo at their workstations before we would screen them. In the end, we were very satisfied with this approach."

Mokko's Marc Rousseau observes that compositing in a non-stereo feature is all about cheating, while in the stereo world, the basics have to be re-mastered.

Frantic also did custom development to facilitate how the metadata translated to the actual camera rig to simplify final 3-D renders. The 3-D camera systems used to shoot Journey were equipped to change their interocular distance dynamically, making the process of tracking and then applying a basic offset to the second camera impossible. Fortunately, the cameras recorded additional metadata that captured all of the animated interocular movements. Frantic wrote tools to extract this data and used it to generate the second camera. The tools also allowed for some additional tweaking to correct imperfections in the information recovered from the footage.

Marc Rousseau, the vfx supervisor from Mokko, discussed their compositing contributions: "Compositing in a non-stereo feature is all about cheating. Cheat perspective, cheat distances, cheat rotopaint, etc. In the stereo world, this is not possible at all. So everything we have been working really hard at mastering over the last 15 years is now obsolete. So, we then needed to go back to the basics of compositing and CG and forget all the cheats we have come to use."

Hybride created 234 stereoscopic vfx shots for the film using SOFTIMAGE|XSI. A total of 80 Hybride employees contributed to the vfx production for more than 15 months in order to create the various digital visual effects. Character and object animation included "glowbirds," skull and snapping plants; interior and exterior environments included diamond chamber, volcano, grotto, lagoon, mushroom grove and thermal river; while organic effects included embers, lava, smoke, water fumes and dandelions.

Pierre Raymond, Hybride's visual effects producer and supervisor singled out interaction with a 3-D environment as the most problematic.

"Our biggest challenge was to have live actors and various objects interact in 3-D stereoscopic. Not only was it imperative for the animation to look natural, realistic and fluid, but it also had to interact perfectly with the actors' actions in a three-dimensional environment. Another challenge was striking the right balance between stereoscopic images and visual comfort throughout all 234 shots. And so, it was with these parameters in mind that we approached this daring project, which allowed us to utilize all of our departments and know-how."