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.”
Looking at Conran it is hard to imagine how he secured the talents of three of Hollywood’s most bankable stars and was given a reported $70 million to create his vision. He grew up in Flint, the Michigan auto industry town. His dad worked for Chevrolet as a middle manager in charge of stocking parts for the assembly line.
Conran left Flint, the first in his family to do so, to attend CalArts, the filmmaking school in Los Angeles. Around this time, Conran began to think about the possibility of making a movie entirely on a computer. The software was growing more sophisticated by the day. After graduation, on a Macintosh IIci he bartered for, he began the early version, the 1.0, of “The World of Tomorrow.” Animating his giant robots. Constructing his virtual Manhattan. After four years of work, he had six minutes of film.
One night, Marsha Oglesby, a Hollywood producer, came by for dinner and persuaded Conran to show her the six minutes. She was blown away by its look and feel. She showed the movie to her boss, Jon Avnet, who showed it and the script to Jude Law, who showed it to Gwyneth Paltrow, and then they brought in Italian producer Aurelio De Laurentiis for financing and Paramount bought the domestic rights.
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.
