LOS ANGELES -- He is like that guy who worked
in your office once, the shy tech-geek, the temp down in IT. Until very
recently, that guy was Kerry Conran. For more than a decade, Conran was
the computer nerd at a series of temporary jobs at newspapers and magazines.
He didn't want money. No, he wanted to barter for his services, for 3-D
graphic software and hard drives with mega-capacity. "Every job I took,
it was with computer parts in mind," he says. "And that's how I built my
Frankenstein."
Conran never cared much about rebooting your system. Rather,
he was imagining, with a kind of mad scientist desire, rebooting the entire
movie industry. And now the world can see what Conran has wrought, with
the release last Friday of "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," a movie
the writer-director began envisioning when he was 10 years old.
Nostalgic yet weird
It is a fantastical and original piece of work that feels
at once comfortable and nostalgic but weird and new. Set in 1939, it stars
Jude Law as the dashing Sky Captain, Gwyneth Paltrow as the plucky reporter
Polly Perkins and Angelina Jolie as the eye-patched Franky Cook. The actors
are real. But everything else in the movie has been created on a computer.
No locations. No sets. Every backdrop and scene that appears in the movie
-- the giant robots marching down 6th Avenue; the hanging gardens of Shangri-La;
the undersea lair of the evil mastermind Totenkopf; Radio City Music Hall
-- exist only on a hard drive, put together from a melange of photographs,
paintings and animation.
The actors spent 26 days on a soundstage in London, performing
their scenes against a completely blue background, blue from floor to wall
to ceiling, a blank canvas. And then Conran and his team added everything
else -- the Zeppelin docking at the Empire State Building, the tiny elephant
that could fit into the palm of your hand, the flying aircraft carrier,
the undersea monsters.Many action adventure movies today employ computer-animation
and special effects, but they also use real locales, build elaborate stage
sets and create their monsters out of plastic, foam, paint and wire. "Sky
Captain" is different; it is one giant special effect.
Conran believes that his techniques -- the live-action
movie taking place on a virtual set -- will usher in "a renaissance of
independent filmmaking." With a computer-generated world for the actors
to move through, Conran says a film can take place anywhere one's imagination
can go, ancient Egypt or Mars in 2054. For a fraction of the cost, he says.
"The studios today are in this awkward and horrible position where films
cost so much money to make, they have to be cautious so they can appeal
to the broadest audience, so that is half the point of this experiment,
to see if independent filmmakers and studios can both take chances again,
to think differently."
Creating an animatic
The industry trades estimate the movie eventually cost
$70 million to make. Not cheap. Conran says he is not an accountant, shrugs
and says, "What the movie cost is one-quarter to one-third of a live-action
summer movie like `Van Helsing' or `Spider-Man."' In a warehouse in Van
Nuys, Calif., Conran and crew used the script to create a series of hand-drawn
storyboards for the whole movie. Then they transferred those images into
the computer and made a moving motion picture, a rough draft called an
animatic, where the planes fly and cartoon characters move.
Conran and team could decide, from the animatic, all their
virtual camera angles and virtual shots. In London, they built a huge blue
soundstage and placed numbered dots on the floor. "The dots would be this
grid, and when we filmed a scene, say at Radio City Music Hall, we'd tell
Gwyneth to walk from G1 to H5 to J17 and the camera would be set on F12
filming." Before shooting the take, Paltrow watched the animatic of her
character walking through Radio City. So she could react to things that
weren't there, like Giant Robots. As Conran filmed Paltrow, he could also
watch another screen that allowed him to see Paltrow moving through his
computer-generated sets. Conran says: "The benefit for the actors was they
could watch the movie, the scene, in the animatic version before we shoot
it on the soundstage."
After the principal filming was completed in London, Conran
and his illustrators could then tweak every scene, changing the lighting,
making the monsters bigger, smaller, brighter or darker. "We would generate
backgrounds, literally making paintings on glass canvas," scanning them
into the computer, "then adding photographs we'd alter or enhance and 3-D
imagery we'd create from scratch."
"The beauty was we could do anything we wanted," he
says. Conran is already writing the script and imagining the visuals for
his next movie, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" series
of pulp novels.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
'Sky Captain' tops B.O. with $16.2 mil
Variety Box Office News ~ Sunday September 18, 2004
During a tepid weekend at the box office, Paramount's "Sky
Captain and the World of Tomorrow" debuted in the top spot at $16.2 million.
The Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow starrer played at 3,170 theaters.
Sky Captain and the World
of Tomorrow
Saturday September 17, 2004
After being delayed from its summer debut because the
special effects shots were incomplete, Paramount made the bold decision
to open this potential franchise in the dead zone of September. That move
appears to have been a bad decision, as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
managed only $5.1 million on its first day of business. It probably will
have a decent multiplier since the film is upbeat family fare the likes
of which hasn't been seen for awhile. Give it a 2.9 and $14.8 million for
the weekend. There's no way Paramount is going to come anywhere near recouping
the $70 million budget of this film domestically, which probably means
that director Kerry Conran's involvement in the Princess of Mars saga might
become an uncertainty.
Box
Office Prophets
A
Close and chilling encounter with what is believed to be a new breed of
giant killer ape has rocked the science world. The massive apes live in
the darkest reaches of the jungles of the African Congo.The reportedly
intelligent beasts hunt in packs, silently stalking their prey for hours,
before attacking.Wildlife experts and scientists are baffled. They cannot
say for sure whether the apes are a more aggressive family of chimpanzees
or a new species of great ape.
.
. . Many people visited "Jungleland" in the early 1960s and fell in love
with the Conejo Valley and moved there. I'd like to tell you that there
would not have been a Jungleland if there had not been a "Lion Farm" first.
