FADE IN:

Entrenched in the soft dirt of dense jungle outside Hanoi, a tank and anti-aircraft gun rake the sky with rounds of flak. A low-flying A-6 Intruder, red-ribboned with tracers, drops a bomb. Suddenly, a hot white flash bursts behind the anti-aircraft gun, hurling chunks of earth and jagged shards of metal outward.

CUT TO:

Two boys running for their lives along a towering wooden train trestle spanning a deep gorge. A locomotive barrels down on the boys, nipping at their heels, snorting angrily in fire-belly bursts of steam. The trestle is too long, the train too fast. The massive locomotive looms up behind them, about to crush the boys between the steel rails, when they reach the end of the trestle and tumble off the track to safety.

CUT TO:

A man strolling in a busy office, navigating his way through a corporate sea of blue blazers and wagging tongues as he talks to us. Without warning, all action in the room freezes into a still photo--except for the man, who continues wandering among the people and furniture, telling us about the advantages of a phone system. He finishes his pitch. The room unfreezes and the action resumes.

FADE OUT.

The three scenes above have one thing in common--they were all shot inside the same 100-square-foot area of a sound studio. A jungle scene in Paramount Pictures' war film, "Flight of the Intruder," the perilous train scene from Rob Reiner's "Stand by Me" and the Clio Award-winning commercial for AT&T were all accomplished with Introvision, a visual effects process that has been fooling movie and TV audiences for a decade.

The system can transport live-action actors to virtually any setting imaginable and allow them to step \o7 inside\f7 their surroundings. Actors move around within a three-dimensional, illusory landscape, stepping in front of, around and behind objects that are not really there.

"Basically, the technique lets you create a foreground and a middle ground in front of a background that you've already shot," said director John Milius, who directed the $30-million "Flight of the Intruder," which opens Friday. "You can shoot miniature explosions and things like that, and then put real people in front of the explosions."

Director Dick Lowry, whose TV movie "Miracle Landing" last year re-created the midair disaster that ripped the top off Aloha Airlines Flight 243, said: "We had airplane parts, luggage, heavy steel items and metal flying at passengers, and, in fact, they're weren't. But visually you look at it on film and you cannot tell."