Rocky Mountain Express, a new IMAX® Experience by award-winning filmmaker Stephen Low is now available for exhibition. The production was filmed with full 15/70 negative, guaranteeing spectacular image fidelity on the giant screen. A showprint is available for previewing in Europe beginning mid-December.

Rocky Mountain Express had its World Premiere at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa/Gatineau September 30th and is now running in Toronto, Chicago, Cincinnati, Seattle, Baltimore, Lubbock and Pittsburgh and is slated to open in Den Haag, Vancouver, Victoria and others. The film propels audiences on a present-day steam train journey through the breathtaking vistas of the Canadian Rockies and relates the extraordinary story of the building of the nation’s first transcontinental railway. Ride the rails along deep river canyons and over high mountain passes—discover some of the most beautiful and rugged landscapes on earth and join in the human drama and epic engineering that shaped a continent. Find out more!

Magic Journey to Africa 3D has been given a Special Mention Award by the European Observatory on Children’s TV (OETI) for having an exceptional educational value to an international children’s audience. 

For the first time in its 15-year history, OETI has decided to distinguish a film with a Special Mention Award, recognising Magic Journey to Africa’s original creativity and deep educational message. The award was delivered during the annual session of the XV International Audiovisual Festival celebrated in Barcelona, Spain, last November 14th.

This month National Geographic Cinema Ventures (NGCV) launches “Wildest Weather in the Solar System,” a show produced for fulldome and digital planetarium screens. It takes audiences on a spectacular journey to witness beautiful, powerful and mysterious weather phenomena on our neighboring planets. The 25-minute show, available in both 2D and 3D, was created in partnership with Lockheed Martin and produced and distributed by NGCV. Evans & Sutherland (and its Spitz subsidiary), Global Immersion and Sky-Skan are distributing it to fulldome theaters worldwide.

Magic Journey to Africa 3D, the movie for IMAX Large Format, regular theatres and television, has already been distributed to more than 40 countries across the globe. This is an extraordinary achievement for an independent production aimed at a children and family audience. Filmed in the stunning landscapes of the desert and the savanna of Namibia and South Africa, the film Magic Journey to Africa, has a high educational value and has been specially recommended for children by the Ministry of Culture of Spain.

Magic Journey to Africa will open the XVth edition of the European Observatory of the Children’s Television OETI next 14th of November, and also the children’s cinema event at the International Festival of Latin American Cinema that will take place in La Habana, in Cuba, in December.

National Geographic Cinema Ventures (NGCV) received four awards at this year’s Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, one of the world’s top competitions for wildlife and environmental film and television production. “Flying Monsters 3D,” a new giant-screen and digital 3D film produced by Atlantic Productions in association with Sky 3D and distributed by NGCV, took home the honors for Best 3D Film. “The Last Lions,” a feature-length documentary produced and distributed by NGCV and directed by National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence Dereck and Beverly Joubert, received awards for Best Theatrical Film, Best Music and Best Editing.

GSF & D3D officially commenced with production on The Ice Age    on October 7 in Los Angeles.  In the first week of production, the team captured tar pit and sloth cave sequences into which Frima Studios will composite the Pleistocene’s CG animals: Columbian mammoths, sabertooth cats, dire wolves and the giant Shasta ground sloth. The production next moves to Yellowstone National Park’s picturesque Lamar Valley to shoot backplates for the wintery steppe tundra, environs once home to the iconic wooly mammoth.

D3D Cinema is pleased to announce that its first U.K. giant screen digital 3D conversion at Millennium Point in Birmingham is underway. The former IMAX theater is set to become the Midlands largest, independent digital 3D cinema. Outfitted with twin state-of-the-art Barco 4K digital projectors paired with industry-leading Dolby Digital 3D technology, the new system will allow Millennium Point to show a wider selection of 3D feature films as well as a larger variety of 2D movies and documentaries. Millennium Point will reopen the theater at the end of October with The Adventures of Tintin 3D.

3D Entertainment Distribution is pleased to announce that its latest IMAX theatre release, Sea Rex 3D: Journey to a Prehistoric World, won the award for Best Earth Sciences Program yesterday at the prestigious 2011 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival. The biennial 6-day conference considered by many to be the “Oscars of Wildlife Filmmaking” is an unmatched international industry event drawing international leaders in science, conservation, broadcasting and media.