"It's a cockeyed way to make a movie," Kerry Conran admits as he rushes to finish his science-fiction adventure, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Due out June 25, Sky Captain is Conran's first picture; it's also the first live-action studio release in which every scene is at least partly computer-generated. The actors are real, but just about everything else, from city sidewalks to exploding zeppelins, is digital. "A lot of filmmakers would find it limiting, but I find it strangely liberating," Conran declares. "You wish you could just move that actor over an inch? Well, we can."
A CalArts grad with a fondness for comics, vintage movies, and computers, Conran set out a decade ago to make an old-fashioned black-and-white movie serial about a mad scientist and his robot army. No studio would hand a novice $100 million to re-create 1930s Manhattan, so he turned to his Macintosh IIci and started rendering robots while supporting himself with computer consulting gigs. "I sort of disappeared from the face of the earth," he says. He covered his windows with tinfoil, tacked bluescreen to the walls, transformed his living room into a soundstage, and recruited his friends as actors. Then it hit him: After four years he had just six minutes of finished film.
His big break came when he hooked up with Jon Avnet, the veteran Hollywood producer who'd made Tom Cruise a star with Risky Business. In Avnet's hands, Conran's little indie film morphed into a major motion picture. Avnet signed Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow to star and talked Aurelio De Laurentiis - Italy's top producer - into funding the project. Conran went back to work with a small army of animators, modelers, color artists, compositors, and editors, plus terabytes of storage and a couple of hundred rendering machines. As before, he relied on off-the-shelf tools - standard f/x and editing software like Maya, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe After Effects. "I didn't create any software," he says. "The leap I made was borrowing conventions" - and then exploiting them to the max.
To create the illusion of depth, for example, he used the multiplane technique Walt Disney invented for Snow White, stacking animation cels in layers so they can be moved independently. While today's filmmakers routinely interleave live-action footage with digital animation, they're rarely as obsessive as Conran: There are crowd scenes in which he shot 100 people separately so he could manipulate each one as he pleased.
Conran's obsessiveness didn't stop there. Long before he met Law and Paltrow on the London soundstage, he had his team prepare animated storyboards for each of the film's 2,031 shots. Using stand-ins, he filmed the entire movie against bluescreen. He built a virtual studio inside his computer, marking off a 3-D grid that corresponded inch by inch to the soundstage they'd be working on. "It was amazing," says Paltrow, "because you could watch the movie before you did it. But there were no props, no sets - it was like doing a '60s off-off-Broadway play."
Not every filmmaker wants to disappear inside a computer, and not every actor wants to work in a void. "You get a little nuts in that blue," says Paltrow. "I started to feel like, if I ever see this color again, I'm going to kill myself." Yet there may be benefits to Conran's technique that can't be ignored. "The breakthrough," Avnet says, "is that we didn't go all over the world, so the cost was staggeringly less" - about $40 million, compared with $80 million for Law's Cold Mountain, which required an extended location shoot in Romania. "That's something the film world is going to have to pay attention to."
Contributing editor Frank Rose (rose @wiredmag.com) wrote about China's mobile phone wars in Wired 12.04.
credit Courtesy Paramount
Conran on set.
credit Courtesy Paramount
credit Courtesy Paramount
Paltrow and Law scream through the streets in his P-40 Warhawk.
