The stereoscopic 3D sequence in this show won the second Prix Pixel-INA award for special effects at the Imagina computer graphics festival in Monte-Carlo in 1994.
The 3D dream sequence in the film shows a concise, stylized, dystopian view of evolution. First, liquid human beings emerge from the live-giving source of water, then solidify into male and female glass dancers moving in harmony. But they soon grow wary of each other, put on armor and start fighting, culminating in a nuclear blast.
The Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company filmed a female and a male dancer, one at a time due to technical limitations. They used motion capture video to record the movement of bright little balls on key parts of their bodies, in order to realistically animate the static computer models. Diana Walczak had sculpted the original figures as almost life-size clay models, but to speed the process, she built only one vertical half. They were then cast in fiberglass, scanned into the computer, and the one half was digitally mirrored to produce a full figure. Ray tracing was applied to exactly calculate the way light reflected on and through their glass bodies. The dancers were then copied several times to create a group of eight. Each image had to be processed twice to generate two slightly shifted 3D frames. [Source: How did they do it? Computer Illusion in Film & TV, by Christopher W. Baker]
To create the illusion of a live talk show, Douglas Trumbull shot the live footage for the film at 60 frames per second, resulting in a very bright, sharp image. It was back projected on a large screen, with live stagehands walking around in front, and various pieces of furniture jutting out from the screen, enhancing its realistic appearance. [Source: How did they do it? Computer Illusion in Film & TV, by Christopher W. Baker]
Though a solar eclipse has long been considered a bad omen and associated with supernatural events, it was mainly introduced in the attraction as a practical narrative trick: the audience was led to believe they needed glasses to protect them from exposure to the sun, but in fact they were stereo glasses for viewing the 3D animations. [Source: Computer Graphics World magazine, October 1993]