I left a show a few weeks ago Hurricanes In 4DX (a multi-sensory experience where your seat moves, water splashes in your face, wind blows through your hair, and flashing lights mimic lightning) I felt like I rode the craziest roller coaster at Six Flags. Even after the movie was over, I had a giddy smile on my face and immediately sat down to write about it. I even bought tickets to the movie The original film is set to be released soon, Hurricanein the same format.
I wasn't the only one who fell in love with this theater format: Hurricanes 4DX imaging has supported its impressive performance at the box office; the technology is more than 15 years old but is so well suited to a hurricane movie that Accordingly Diversity“initial ticket sales…were approximately $2.1 million…30% more than the format’s previous opening weekend record holder, 2023 Super Mario Brothers Movie.” So how are 4DX screenings created and programmed? And how did this exciting way to watch movies come about? I sat down with Paul Kim, senior vice president of content and production at CJ 4DPLEX, a Seoul-based cinema technology company pioneering the medium, to learn more about the technology and the impressive team behind it.
The rise of 4DX
“Movies are a big part of the entertainment culture in Korea,” Kim said on a video call. “We had a lot of big theaters that were open 24 hours a day, because people would go see them at four in the morning. And any new technology, a new way to watch movies, [the Korean audience is] always leading up to that. 4DX made perfect sense.”
The first 4DX movie was a largely forgotten film from 2009 Journey to the Center of the EarthIt was shown at the CGV Sangam theater in Seoul, South Korea. However, the media's popularity, Avatar It premiered a few months later at the same theater — since then, the 4DX team has coded “about 80 movies a year,” according to Kim. Part of the appeal of watching 4DX is its immersion (which Kim admits is “not for everyone”), but he suggests there's something else that makes it extra special.
“You sit down and there’s always a bunch of people who’ve never seen a movie in 4DX and the first thing or jolt happens and you hear giggles all over the theater and it’s almost a relief, right?” He continues, “That’s the thing, you’re in a theater, you’re there to have fun, and everyone looks around and says, ‘Is it okay if I laugh, is it okay if I enjoy this so much?’ But everyone does it and it becomes a communal thing.”
There are now 678 4DX theaters spread across 65 countries, and while America got its first in 2014, it currently has the world’s largest: Regal Times Square, which seats almost 300 (an impressive feat considering how big 4DX seats need to be). I tell Kim that this is where I saw it Hurricanes“It's huge. It's unheard of,” he says, smiling.
How are 4DX movies screened?
There's something I've been dying to understand about 4DX, something that's been bugging me ever since I left that theater happily dazed: How are movies programmed? It's certainly conceivable that such a large, global company would use cutting-edge technology to simplify and speed up the process of converting a movie to 4DX, but Kim says it's much more special than that.
“There’s a misconception that this is some kind of automated process. It’s not. We have a full team of artists, or editors as we call them, working on every 4DX movie,” Kim explains. “We get the final cut of the movie, or sometimes a working version of it, weeks before the initial release. Our editors then sit down at their computers, we have software that works with our equipment, and they go scene by scene. Sometimes, when there’s a lot of action, like Hurricanes“They'll go frame by frame if necessary to make sure every little bump of the truck, every lightning strike, matches up and synchronizes properly. I have to give credit to the team because it's a very creative process, it's not just something that happens, it takes a lot of time, work, effort and dedication.”
Who sums up the opening Hurricanes “There's a lull before the storm, where you're introduced to the characters in their trucks. And when the tornado starts to form, we had to think, 'Okay, who is the character we want to highlight now? The truck or the tornado as it's moving away from the tornado?'” [itself]?' And at a certain point we decided, 'Okay, we're going to downplay the truck because everything is about the tornado right now,'” he explains. “It's just about what character we want to highlight — and the character, it doesn't necessarily have to be a human character.”
It takes 4DX editors about two weeks to program the experience for a two-hour movie. “On average, you have two teams working on it,” Kim says. “One team works specifically on the chairs, their movement and the vibrations. The other team then layers in the effects, the water, the weather, the strobe lights, the fog, all of that. And then you have an art director, or as we call it, the executive producer. And they watch over all of that like a conductor, making sure that all the pieces are working together harmoniously and contributing to the story.”
The 4DX team then brings a producer onto the film to see the final cut and make suggestions. Kim says this part of the process is always incredibly productive, just like Dune: Episode Tworeleased earlier this year. “There's a sequence where there's a device, a shooter to summon sandworms. And when there's a close-up of the shooter, we added a vibration to the seats. But when it's far away and you don't see it, we stopped that vibration because it's not on the screen anymore. One of those Dune The editors came in and said, 'You know what would be really cool? Even if it's not on screen, just keep hitting it, keep the vibration going… in the background, you know it's happening, there's a sandworm, you know it's coming, but it gives it that little bit of extra suspense and tension.' It was the greatest idea ever.”
Before we end our conversation, Kim tells me another anecdote to prove how much creative energy goes into 4DX screenings. “I was in Korea with a team in June and I was sitting down with our executive producer. He’s been encoding or editing 4DX movies for 15 years, he’s done over 315 of them on his own, he knows this stuff,” he says. “And he told me he bought a gyroscope and an accelerometer. Godzilla Minus One“A lot of it is on boats or ships. He rented a boat and went out with the gyroscope to see how much it would shake, and he raced go-karts with the accelerometer to see how much force was applied on tight corners. It's not just, 'OK, it looks like it's turning left, so let's turn the chairs left.' It's that nuance, there's a real sense of care in designing 4DX for each film.”
Who tells me this? Hurricanes It was a “match made in heaven” in 4DX, but the team was still pleasantly surprised by the hype. “It was appreciated by the audience, it made sense, it’s like you said, the perfect storm.” But he thinks there’s another new film in 4DX that’s a must-see: Alien: Romulus“I highly recommend seeing this in 4DX,” he says, grinning mischievously.
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