Slo Graffiti executive producer Laura Howard and Platinum Dragon director and principal Charlie Watson serve as president and executive creative director of Tunnelvision respectively.

The concept for Tunnelvision is derived from the traditional flip-book. Equipped with strobe lights, images light up as a train passes through the tunnel, generating a moving picture.

Howard explains, "They put a thousand posters on a wall inside a tunnel that are illuminated with a strobe light system and a small computer chip, which is the invention that we went out to patent. When a train goes by they illuminate one-by-one sequentially. It's like animation outside the window."

Innovator Charlie Watson was inspired to create Tunnelvision while studying film and animation at college in London. Experimenting with sound from a magnetic film strip, Watson stuck pieces of film to a wall and recorded sound as a tape head ran across the surface.

"We were playing around with different film techniques," recalls Watson. "And then I'd be on the Tube going into London almost every day and looking out the window thinking, 'Wouldn't it be cool if there were images out there.'"

Years later, Watson would continue to develop the idea while in Los Angeles, attaching large still images to a fence in Griffith Park. "I would collect all of these little flip-books, blow them up to two feet square and hang them along a fence with clothespins," says Watson. "I would drive alongside with a light really close to the fence and try to film it with a video camera at the same time. It wasn't working, it looked blurry like film that skips while going through a projector."

Researching persistence of vision, Watson began contemplating the means to creating a seamless image. "I got one of those $30 strobe lights, went back to Griffith Park, drove close to the fence and sure enough there was some kind of sequence. That's when it really clicked."

Howard and Watson identified the top 200 sites for Tunnelvision based on the shape and distance of the tunnels and began negotiating with transportation departments in major urban centers including: London, Chicago, Paris, Prague, San Francisco and Atlanta.

"Most of the sites we picked are in the center of the shopping district or urban areas," says Howard. "The way that it works is you have a captive audience. Once they get on the train that's a huge advantage."

Likening the project to a public art charter, Tunnelvision's founders insist the project be intended for artistic purposes as opposed to an outlet for retail advertisements. "We've actually turned down a couple of clients because they wanted to do really retail-based messages and we really want it to be beautiful," says Howard. "If it's not beautifying the subway system, then not only is the city not going to like it but we don't want to do it.

"We want people to understand that it's a location-based media; it's meant to be like a special event. It's not the kind of media that's going to become ubiquitous like billboards."

Tunnelvision has the potential to be used in a variety of venues such as indoor and outdoor tunnels, airport runways and even roadways, which can be viewed from public transportation equipped with transparent floors.

Imagine a scene from Alice in Wonderland showing in a subway tunnel. Alice drinks from a bottle (namely a product positioned to target commuters) which is then made available on the platform as they exit the train.

Executed properly, the "discovery process" will continue to captivate viewers. "If someone's running alongside the train and interacting," proposes Watson, "that's an art piece that people are going to want to experience again and again."

Tunnelvision will be available to agencies through Slo Graffiti, a division of Palomar Pictures, whose roster includes: Doug Aitkin, Luk Besson and the Snorri Brothers.