From a physical standpoint, the main difference between shooting Circle-Vision 200 and Circle-Vision 360 was mounting only five cameras on the central pedestal, instead of nine. All of the support equipment remained the same, but physical production was expedited because the narrower field of view created a 160-degrees space to the rear that could be used to hide personnel and keep technical equipment close at hand. This also facilitated using specially built camera rigs designed for the limited view, in addition to cranes and dollies that typically would be visible in the back cameras of Circle-Vision 360.

The enormous underwater housing that had been created for photography on The Eternal Sea required ballast to maintain an even weight distribution. Despite being a five-camera production, nine cameras had to be loaded in the rig at all times underwater, even if this meant the back screens might be obscured or otherwise unusable. The bulk and weight of the water-tight housing necessitated using a huge crane on a barge to lower the unit into the water. The same underwater rig was also used in a salmon stream for Portraits of Canada (1986), with a submersible at a shipwreck in the Bahamas for From Time to Time (aka The Timekeeper) (1992), and in the Florida Keys for American Journeys (1984), all Circle-Vision 360 productions.

Aerial photography for both Circle-Vision 200 productions utilized Aérospatiale Lama helicopters for their high-lift capability. Unfortunately, none of these helicopters, not even a lesser-powered Bell Jet Ranger, were available anywhere in the South Pacific. Instead, a twin-engine North American Mitchell B-25 bomber was transported by its flight crew from Vancouver, Canada, island-hopping all the way to Tahiti. A specialized mechanical arm, which had been used for aerial photography on Canada 67 for the Montreal EXPO in 1967, swung the Circle-Vision cameras down and out of the bomb bay far enough below the WWII-era aircraft that the airframe was not visible during photography.

Another device created specifically for The Eternal Sea production was an actuator-driven stabilizer system for filming on the sea. The one-of-a-kind unit was built by Nelson Tyler who had achieved great fame as a designer of helicopter camera mounts. The Circle-Vision camera rig (again requiring the symmetrical balancing of all nine cameras) could remain perfectly level, even when filming in 15-ft (4.57m) seas in the English Channel – a must to avoid seasickness effecting audiences. A gasoline-driven generator powered a hydraulic pump that actuated the mount’s stabilizers, making for a noisy and cumbersome set-up – but the results were worth the extra effort. The same stabilization unit was later used on American Journeys (1984) for a shot from a small Coast Guard vessel, weaving among glaciers in Alaska.

Don Iwerks and the Disney Studio Machine Shop also designed and built a tilt-plate rig at the request of Rick Harper for Impressions de France. The specialized device rotated around a pivot point that coincided with the unit’s center of gravity, which meant it could smoothly tilt up or down without much physical effort. While initially fabricated for two specific 200-degree shots (one of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, and another of Mont Saint-Michel, Normandy), the same rig was later used on 360-degree productions like Wonders of China (1982), American Journeys (1984), and Portraits of Canada (1986). Unlike on the five-camera Impressions de France, these productions had to consider what would be appropriate imagery for the back panels because, as the front cameras tilted up, the rear cameras tilted down.

A five-camera base plate built earlier for the Disney Hall of Presidents theme park attraction at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, was also utilized for shots on both Circle-Vision 200 productions. Telephoto images could be captured with 135mm lenses after each individual camera was aligned horizontally. But this flat-base arrangement of the cameras harkened back to the very early days of the original Circarama set-up, with that system’s flaws of overlaps and blind spots. Filming scenes of the ocean from the shore helped minimize this effect because variation in waves did not appear as discontinuities between screens. For The Eternal Sea, a scene filmed on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, required keeping five windsurfers within the confines of their individual frame, not easy to do when fighting natural variables. Had the surfers crossed over from one frame to the next, the illusion of a continuous image would have been broken as they would have either disappeared briefly, or been doubled up. Another five-screen scene on that production was filmed on a tiny South Pacific atoll accessible only by small plane. A single Arriflex camera was set up on a tripod so that the camera could be aligned with the distant horizon. Each of the five locked-off images was shot separately, with careful repositioning of the camera between takes, to create the impression of a full five-camera shot. 

Within the hectic confines of a Disney theme park, there were precious few places where guests could enjoy the comfort of a theatrical presentation while seated. Both Impressions de France and The Eternal Sea played to audiences in air-conditioned theaters, each with a maximum capacity of approximately 260 guests per show. The screens were deeply curved and separated by thin, black vertical strips, called mullions, in order to mask the very slight overlap of imagery between adjacent screens. These theatrical presentations benefited from four advantages over their cousins, the full Circle-Vision 360 shows:

• viewers had no need to crane their necks or physically turn around to see images playing behind them;

• in 360-degree presentations, there is a distracting projector light for the opposite screen emanating from each mullion – in this case the five projectors were located in a booth behind the audience;

• there was no spillover reflection of projector light from back screen imagery that tended to wash-out the screens in front;

• and perhaps most importantly, a 200-degree theater did not suffer from the conflicting sounds that echo back and forth in a geometrically circular theater, so Circle-Vision 200 soundtracks were acoustically superior.