Slashdot Mirror
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow!
ph43thon writes "The New York Times Magazine has a neat story about the sci-fi nerd, Kerry Conran, behind 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.' It's an interesting look at his creative journey starting with a Macintosh IIci. It took him twelve hours just to render individual robot legs. Antisocial, shy people rejoice! Hide in your homes until you get discovered by a movie producer!!"
my first computer wasn't a IIci, it was a 286. even so, the IIci was certainly my first love. i can remember those romantic hours that i would spend with my IIci, waiting for POVRAY to finish rendering...
of course those days are over, but i don't think that I could ever remove the IIci from its place in the corner of my room.
I'd be very interested in seeing the short that he first made. My best friend from high school would spend days rendering movies in Infini-D on his LCIII that were very entertaining and choreographed space battles. Anybody got a link to it?
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
Crimson Skies is one of the few video game-to movies I'd go see. I've always been in love with the same period of history as this director, and I can relate to his passion for the period, and the wild optimism and imagination that flourished. In so many ways, we've gone either backwards, or just settled for less. The depression and WWII came, and smashed those dreams for good. And I think we've suffered the consequences in spirit ever since.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Wow, that had to be an excruciatingly tedious experience. The IIci had a 25Mhz 68030 and maxed out at 128MB RAM (though all that RAM would have cost nearly as much as the IIci back then, and the standard IIci was 1 or 4 MB out of the box). They used something like 320K of system RAM for video, though 3rd party NuBus video cards were readily available (still, with only something like 2MB or 4MB of VRAM).
There's no mention of which software he used, but I recall that in '94 the big Mac 3D package was ElectricImage, with Strata 3D and Infini-D at the low end of the scale (~$500 or so). Photoshop was at around version 2 or 2.5; it wasn't until 3.0 when layers were implemented.
I remember trying to model and animate on an Amiga 500 with Turbo Silver back in 1989: anything with reflection or refraction would take about 24 hours per frame. Five years later, I was using Autodesk 3D Studio (R3 for DOS) on a 486 and had a room full of PCs for doing network rendering. Watching that red "Rendering" bar creep across the screen became a thing of the past (well, except for previews and such). Those five years were an interesting time, seeing the price point for a computer powerful enough for doing productive animation work (and digital video and audio) fall to where an independent artist could afford one.
Gotta hand it to Kerry Conran: if he had the patience to model and animate on a IIci, he surely paid his dues.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
All I can say is bravo for the dude. If the movie does well hurray if not atleast he got to fulfill his dream. Im sure we are all a little envious. I'm goin to see it just to support a guy who pushed hard for the perfection of his dream. Also nay-sayers remember Blade Runner wasn't that much a success either when it first came out but its one of the pivotial points in Sci-Fi movies. I think this will be of similar importance.
Is it just me or has no one noticed that this movie is a rip off of the Japanese Anime movie "Laputa" (by Miyazaki Hayao)...? Maybe the story is original, but the world and technology it is set in doesn't seem to be.
All the works of Miyazaki have a much more European feel to them. At nausicaa.net there is an oft-cited FAQ that directly addresses the question of when and where Laputa takes place: "It is believed to have taken place at the end of the 19th Century or the beginning of the 20th Century, in an alternate universe where flying technology was more advanced (a la Verne). According to Miyazaki, he wrote "Laputa" as a "science fiction novel which was written in the end of the 19th century". The events of Laputa takes place "In an imaginary country. The Slug Ravine, where Pazu lived was modeled after a mining town in Wales. Miyazaki went to Wales for location hunting, and learned that the town had had a huge labor dispute the year before. This story and the scenery of the depressed mining town (he being a former chairman of a union) affected him, and made him put the scene of the townfolk fighting with the pirates in the movie. You can also see a socialist-looking poster in the house of Pazu's boss." It seems thus Laputa has more of a Jules Verne/Johnathan Swift 18th/19th century flavor to it. In contrast, "Sky Captain", from the looks of the trailer, takes it visual cues more from mid 20th century WWII era cultural icons. I'd go so far as to say "Sky Captain" also feels more American than anything Miyazaki has done.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Well, of course it's true that the movie has more of its roots in Sky King with a little of old Superman scientist villains tossed in, but Doc Savage and the Shadow are far, far better known pulp heroes.
I don't begrude someone for not knowing Sky King. I begrudge them seriously for not knowing ANYTHING about pulp.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Yeah, ditto Tron. The 20th anniversary DVD of that was simply amazing in scope. It also serves to remind you that sometimes a movie can be ahead of it's time.
For instance, can you believe that Tron did not win any special effects academy awards because their 'overuse' of computer generated effects disqualified them??!
If you get a copy of this, check out how painstakingly the movie was done and then realize how badly the Tron artists were ripped off!
Considering how many special effects there are in even non-science fiction movies nowadays, I don't think this will be too much of a stretch for people who get the concept of this kind of pulp fiction.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
It's not just you. I noticed a bunch of Miyazaki elements: robots from Laputa or Nausicaa, the premise of a lone flying hero whose face is invisible on a retro plane from Rosso (or even Nausikaa). The scenes filled with all-wing flying machines may look like from Conan (if anyone knows this TV series, not to be confused with Arnold movie).
Still, even with all those elements, I wouldn't call the movie a rip off of Miyazaki. Certainly the creators were inspired by Miyazaki's works, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Miyazaki, too, was influenced by many other creators himself--Nausikaa was a Dune rip-off. etc.