My blogger friend Julie Bogart has been up to her eyeballs lately keeping up with her grad work and keeping fellow cyberspace junkies like myself inspired by her ongoing excellent articles which can be found at Julie Unplugged. ...and...as a result Julie has apparently failed to keep up with some very important recent news regarding her favorite band U-2. So Julie, I am passing along this article for you.

U2's Vertigo Tour may soon create a real sense of vertigo among moviegoers as the band is planning to release its first 3-D concert film next year. The untitled feature is being directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington. In conjunction with the film's anticipated mid- to late-2007 debut, U2 also might take part in the first live 3-D performance projected in theaters nationwide.

For the film, Owens and Pellington shot more than 700 hours of footage with the band in seven South American cities during February and March. Trekking across Argentina, Mexico, Chile and Brazil, the film's 3-D director of photography Peter Anderson ("T2 3-D: Battle Across Time") used nine pairs of Sony Cinealta 950 cameras to capture the band with swooping camera angles and kaleidoscopic imagery. The director of cinematography for the film's 2-D footage is Tom Krueger.

3ality Digital Entertainment, the project's producer, put together of the largest assemblages of 3-D camera technology ever used for a single project. A representative for the band called it "the first-ever 3-D multicamera live shoot."

The feature is being edited in New York by Olivier Wiki and readied for a summer or fall release. Discussions are underway with several major studio distributors. It is expected that the film screen nationwide using the Real D technology in place by theaters screening the digital 3-D release of "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas."

Real D unveiled the first theatrically projected live 3-D event last week at ShowEast in Orlando. It is planning a live 3-D concert presentation next fall, and sources said it might be a U2 concert.

Owens has been the creative director of screen visuals for U2 on several of the band's world tours. Feature director Pellington ("Arlington Road," "The Mothman Prophecies") began his career by directing U2's "One" video.

The soundtrack is produced by Carl Glanville, who also produced the concert DVD "Vertigo 2005/U2 Live From Chicago." Wiki edited the U2 video "Original of the Species," which was nominated for two MTV Video Music Awards.