Sky Captain

[DanMcS]

There was an old thread on this movie, but I couldn't find it.

Anyway, neat article in the New York Times about the guy who made this movie, and how they did it. Very neat. It's interesting to think about what movies will be like once this kind of film-making gets even cheaper and better.

 

[Ghostwind]

Heard about this on the radio today. Very cool story and sounds like the guy behind has genius written all over himself. I will have to find a trailer to download now...

 

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

I don't wanna register for the New York Times online. Can you give me the gist of the article?

 

[Hand of Evil]

Other threads on it.

http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=75159&highlight=captain

http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=74576&highlight=captain

 

[Ghostwind]

Here's the article from the NY Times...


Mr. Invisible and the Secret Mission to Hollywood

</NYT_HEADLINE><NYT_BYLINE version="1.0" type=" ">[size=-1]By JOHN HODGMAN[/size]
</NYT_BYLINE>

Published: March 14, 2004
<NYT_TEXT>

erry Conran is not what you would call descript. He has very short, tan-colored hair, usually covered with a clean, logoless baseball cap. He is 37, somewhat baby-faced and often quiet, with a smile in the corner of his pale blue eyes that suggests he is observing you from a far-off world of his own. And while he can be genial and funny, his default setting seems to be self-deprecation to the point of self-erasure. The second thing of any note he ever said to me was ''I am basically an amorphous blob of nothing.'' The first thing was ''I'm shy.''

This was on the set of his movie ''Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.'' You might expect a little more brio from a writer-director who is making a summer blockbuster with almost unlimited creative control. Set in 1939, the movie stars Jude Law as the daring flying ace Sky Captain, who teams up with his former flame, the intrepid reporter Polly Perkins, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, as they track down a mysterious mad scientist named Totenkopf. It is in part a nostalgic homage to the movies of the 30's and 40's: the hammy fisticuffs and golly-inspiring proto-technology of sci-fi cliffhangers like ''Flash Gordon'' alongside the snappy patter (and even snappier clothes) of the era's noir thrillers.

But like the old serials it emulates, ''Sky Captain'' is mainly preoccupied with the strange promises of the future. The astonishing things you will see in the world of tomorrow include: an immense, silvery zeppelin docking at the Empire State Building; an elephant that fits in the palm of your hand; a troop of giant robots marching down Sixth Avenue and the carpet at Radio City Music Hall. None of these things actually exist, though. Conran has not constructed a single set or miniature. Rather, they are computer images, built and animated in a virtual 3-D environment, or stitched together from photographs, which are then draped around the flesh-and-blood actors, who have been shot separately on an empty set in front of a blank ''blue-screen'' background, along with those few minimal props with which they actually interact (a ray gun, a robot blueprint, a bottle of milk of magnesia). The film, in other words, is one long special effect with Jude-Law-size holes in it.

''The goal was to make a live-action film, but to use conventions of traditional animation,'' Conran said. The reason? ''First and foremost, to do it cheaper.'' It's a model that would appeal to anyone who, like Conran, does not seem entirely comfortable spending other people's money; to anyone who might dream of shooting in Nepal or Paris (or in the 1930's) but doesn't have the means to get there; to anyone who is shy.

For Conran, the question, as he put it, was ''Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?'' And so 10 years ago, Kerry Conran went into a room in his apartment to make a movie. In some ways, he is just now beginning to come out of it.

At first, he was a mystery. Word of ''Sky Captain'' began to spread around the Internet only after Conran finished primary shooting in London last spring -- extraordinarily late for the Internet, which often seems invented specifically to track movies with giant robots in them. Even then, no one knew who Kerry Conran was. Google couldn't touch him. He was so undocumented in the world of Hollywood that I briefly wondered, when I began pursuing him, if perhaps he was just a front for his producer and partner and mentor Jon Avnet, who is well known for producing ''Risky Business'' and directing ''Fried Green Tomatoes'' but who is not so well known for retro-science-fiction summertime blockbusters, and who unlike Conran seems to have been photographed at least once in his life. I don't think Conran would mind that I doubted his existence. In fact, for a long time, that was the plan.

Conran grew up in Flint, Mich., in a pre-cable, pre-VCR period when the Sunday afternoon television crackled with old movies. Kerry and his older brother, Kevin, made capes out of towels and pretended to be superheroes. They steeped themselves in science fiction serials and film noir and the Universal monster movies. After high school, Conran moved to Los Angeles to attend the CalArts live-action filmmaking program, but he mainly hung around with the animators, because they were doing what he wanted to do: they were building worlds. Even as students, they could create anything, go anywhere. ''If you wanted something gigantic,'' he said, ''they could do it. Just draw it.''

--to be continued below...

 

[Ghostwind]

continuing the article...


He didn't want to be an animator, but he wanted their freedom from earthly concerns like budgets and reality. His student film tried to fuse traditional animation and live action in an interactive way he hadn't seen before. He does not like to discuss the film, called ''That Darn Bear,'' except to say that it involved a bear and that it remains, for him, a ''deep gaping wound.''

''I was, like, a year into it, if not a year and a half, and this film called 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' was announced,'' Conran recalled. ''And it was exactly what I was trying to do, but on a scale that, for me, was unimaginable. I filmed it for three years, and never ultimately finished it. It was just, at that point, demoralizing.''

After this, Kerry Conran went into his apartment in Sherman Oaks and pretty much stayed there. A self-trained computer ''nerd hobbyist,'' he supported himself with various custom-software and tech-support jobs. Then in 1993, ''Jurassic Park'' took photo-real computer-generated effects into the cinematic mainstream. At the same time, the first home computers powerful enough to emulate those effects were becoming available. Conran immediately began to experiment with ways to bring film into his Macintosh. He drove around with a camera, filming the sky with a purposefully shaky, home-movie hand, and then he went home and dropped a computer-animated U.F.O. into it -- a hoax.

As the digital-effects industry grew more sophisticated, so did he. He realized he could build whatever he wanted, and what's more, it could be gigantic. Rockets that dwarfed skyscrapers. Airplane hangars so large that you could not see someone on the other side. Because, he explained, ''what does it cost to hit the scale button and make something enormous? Nothing.''

And it didn't matter whether the actors were on a big expensive sound stage or in Conran's tiny apartment. By 1994, he had struck upon the idea of filming an entire movie by himself, at home, with a blue screen set up right in his apartment. He began to create what he was calling ''the World of Tomorrow.''

he title was borrowed from the 1939 World's Fair, along with that period's sleek aesthetic and brash optimism. Conran recalls how moved he was when he saw, in the 1933 ''King Kong,'' that the Empire State Building had at its top an actual zeppelin mooring mast. ''This is why you have to like these people in the 30's and 40's -- because they actually thought they could dock a zeppelin atop the Empire State Building,'' he said. ''And when the math wasn't quite up to snuff, they still said, 'Let's give it a whirl!' They just had these lunatic ideas and acted on them.''

From one of his jobs he had scored a Macintosh IIci, and its hard drive became his sound stage. By today's standards, it was mind-numbingly slow. Every limb of every giant robot had to be rendered separately in advance and reassembled later. Each leg took 12 hours. Each robot had two legs. There were 20 robots.

''I would wake up, and I wouldn't even go to the bathroom,'' he said. ''Frequently I'd sit there and suddenly say: 'Oh! I'm really thirsty!' It would be 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and I hadn't moved. I was a slave to this thing.''

He briefly played with the idea of another hoax: to present the film as the remnants of a never-completed adventure movie by a fictional protege of Frank Capra. ''But I was going to do it in such a way that a few of the shots would have been impossible to achieve,'' Conran explained. After people saw it, he said, ''they would be staggering. They wouldn't know how he did it.'' He decided he would be satisfied if he could create between 20 and 30 minutes of footage this way. After four years of working on it every day, he had six minutes.

But then, as typically occurs when things look darkest in the kind of movies Conran loves, a hero came along to save the day. A friend of his brother's wife came to dinner, a woman named Marsha Oglesby, who happened to be a movie producer. She had been hearing about the short for some time and was eager to see it. Conran protested: he wasn't ready. But she insisted. Six minutes later, she didn't know what to say. ''Can I see that again?'' she asked.

The next day she showed it to her boss, Jon Avnet, who was so impressed that he agreed to finance the movie himself until they could find a studio or investor. Avnet showed it to Jude Law, who then read the whole script and quickly agreed to star and be a co-producer. Avnet and Law then turned to Gwyneth Paltrow, and once she was on board, they decided why not get Angelina Jolie as well, to play the eye-patched rogue known as Frankie? And so they did. Now the film is a major summer release for Paramount, opening June 25.

Like most overnight success stories, this one took about a decade. But now Conran is here, directing movie stars, responsible for a staff of nearly 100, the scale button pushed to enormous. He is visibly amazed and happy to be here. And by all accounts (except his), he has handled the transition from recluse to Hollywood director gracefully. ''He was thrilled and touched that people were willing to realize his vision,'' Jude Law told me by phone. ''He's really a sweet-hearted man. But he's certainly no pushover. He knew exactly what he wanted.''

Still, it's hard not to sense a certain wistfulness, too, as Conran speaks about the old scheme: a phantom man directing a film that wasn't there. ''It would have been cool,'' he said.

In 1939, RKO gave a young radio writer from New York named Orson Welles a contract to write and direct anything he wanted. Jon Avnet wanted that kind of latitude for Conran, but he couldn't find a studio that would offer it. So Avnet built one. He spent nearly a quarter-million dollars to turn a former printing press in industrial Van Nuys into Sky Captain's headquarters, lining nearly every inch with computers and constructing a complete digital-effects house from scratch, with a small blue-screen stage in the back. ''At one point,'' Avnet told me, ''I spent way too much money.'' He estimates he spent about $1 million to develop the film, through his company, Brooklyn Films. Eventually, the Italian producer Aurelio De Laurentiis came in to complete financing, and then last June, Avnet sold the domestic rights to Paramount, for a reported $40 million.

He walked me through a series of three large, dim rooms full of terminals manned by computer modelers, animators, lighters, compositors. Some were touching up artificial clouds and fake skylines. Some were working on snowflakes. Another stared into the watery light of the monitor and slowly ate a leaf of lettuce.

They can do anything here. When one of Paltrow's arms was cut out from a shot, they copied the other one, flipped it and pasted it back in. Since all the lighting was being done on the computer, they could paint the frame with light and noirish shadows, erase it all and then start again.

Stephen Lawes is the compositing supervisor, in charge of combining the real photography, which is all shot on high-definition digital videotape, with the computer world. He showed me how they build a scene, first in black and white, dropping Paltrow into a photograph of an actual deco-period elevator in a municipal building across town. He demonstrated how he tweaked the color until it took on the lush, antique look of the period, and then married it to a virtual film stock to give the movie some of that classic graininess Conran was looking for. The final product was painterly, stately and somewhat uncanny. Avnet said that the approach has allowed the filmmakers to make digital video truly look like physical film, and it does -- but it's a curious kind of verisimilitude, one that imitates the technical limitations of the past, the artful phoniness of the old films it emulates, while adding massive underwater battles. ''We have the ultimate latitude to reframe, play and change,'' Lawes told me. ''It's pretty much like playing God.''

It is the flexibility of the setless, all-digital, centralized production process that, according to Avnet, has allowed them to make the movie for about half what it would have cost to make it traditionally. Still, at a reported budget of $70 million, it's not cheap. And despite Conran's emphasis on the economy of the technique, it is also clear that it affords him other rewards too.

--to be continued below...

 

[Ghostwind]

--final page of the NY Times article...


Among Conran's first official hires was his brother, Kevin, his longtime collaborator since the days they shared a bedroom and wore capes. He is a professional illustrator and was the film's production designer. Together, Kerry and Kevin filigreed the film with cathedral-like touches that only they and the angels will see: the ship that carried King Kong in the 1933 movie, lying on the ocean floor; a line of deactivated robots, leaning against a wall in the exact same positions the Fleischer brothers had them in their moody 1941 Superman cartoon, ''The Mechanical Monsters.'' You will not know unless I tell you that the smudges in the zeppelin cockpit are real actors, because even though you can barely see them, Kerry decided that he would not computer-generate a human being. But he was determined to computer-generate everything else. Even in the briefest close-ups, say, of Polly reaching to retrieve a blueprint from the floor, the carpet at Radio City is an effect, a computerized image based on a photograph of the actual carpet, which Kerry has never seen in person. (As much money as they have supposedly saved, I still wonder if perhaps it wouldn't have been cheaper, at least for this scene, to just buy a rug sample.)

These are the types of details, superfluities and in-jokes that make up the secret language that the Conrans have been speaking since Flint, and it is, in large part, Jon Avnet's to decode. ''I am a non-nerd channeler of Kerry's vision,'' Avnet said.

His pride and affection for Conran are apparent, and he expresses them restlessly, constantly -- though he also reminded me, and himself, that the movie must be more than what he calls ''boys with toys.'' ''After all this incredible technological breakthrough is said and done, how's the story?'' he asked. ''People may be impressed that it was made, but they're not going to substitute being impressed for being entertained.''

In some ways (especially with a deadline looming), the technique offers the director too much flexibility, too much opportunity to haggle over every anxious shadow. As Avnet put it, it is the ''world of pure choice.'' Conran admitted that he might have been working on the movie for 20 years had Avnet not pulled it out of him. ''We joked,'' Avnet said, ''that after the film goes in the theaters, he'll finish it again for DVD, and then five or six years later, he'll have one-quarter of the film finished the way he really likes.''


Conran walked into Avnet's office in a plain black T-shirt, looking a little apprehensive. He had agreed to watch the original six-minute short with me and Avnet, and it was clear he wasn't looking forward to it.

It opens with a black-and-white version of the film's signature shot, a zeppelin docking at the Empire State. I had seen this sequence in one form or another perhaps a dozen times in the last three days. I can't begin to guess how many times Conran has seen it: airship and skyscraper, two antique promises of progress meeting to announce our final liberation from earthly concerns. The short was rudimentary compared with what I'd seen, to be sure. And Conran grimaced throughout. But I was stunned when I considered the painstaking labor with no promise of reward, or even end, in sight. And I thought of all the computers in just this building, each one thousands of times as powerful as a Mac IIci, in the hands of eager, young, lettuce-munching dreamers, and I wondered what worlds they were constructing in their spare time between snowflakes. On the screen, Sky Captain flies to the rescue. I happen to know from Kevin that it's Kerry himself behind the goggles. Naturally, he's masked.

The short ended. Conran blinked a little and smiled. ''Wow,'' he said. ''That was embarrassing.''

Both Avnet and Conran are convinced that ''Sky Captain'' will usher in a new kind of filmmaking. And perhaps this will indeed change the economics of the summer blockbuster. In effect, it's an indie giant-robot movie, taking the digital-video revolution to people who, like Conran, like to push the scale button up to enormous. And you get the feeling that this is what Conran wants the movie to be judged on first -- even more than how much money it makes at the box office, or how real the robots look.

It may be a newfangled movie technique, but it is a very old-fashioned movie story: a fiercely protective producer offering an unheard-of chance to a kid out of nowhere. In the end, it seems to me that this movie is not so much about ushering in the world of tomorrow as it is about realizing ''the World of Tomorrow,'' the vision that has haunted Conran, and now Avnet, for so long.

When it is done, Kerry Conran may make a sequel or go on to other projects, or, as Avnet suggested, he may just want to keep working on this one. When I asked Conran what he would do on opening day, he shook his head. ''Almost my entire adult life has been leading up to this,'' he said. ''I just don't know. I only knew I wanted to do this for a long time.''


--End

 

[s/LaSH]

You know, back before the first X-Men movie was released, Wizard magazine did a joke about what it would have been like had George Lucas been directing.

Cyclops digitally removed, at great expense, from every scene. Cyclops later digitally added back into the scene in exactly the same fashion. No explanation is ever given.

Now it's actually happening, and it looks cool. (I'm honour bound to say that - anything with both barnstorming and art deco in it recieves a government-subsidised Cool voucher, right?)

 

[nHammer]

I am SOOOO looking forward to this movie.

 

[clark411]

I approve of this article if for no other reason that it gives a sideways suggestion that one of the primary functions of the internet is to find and track movies with big robots in them.