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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!!"
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Mr. Invisible and the Secret Mission to Hollywood
By JOHN HODGMAN
Article Photo
(c) Catherine Ledner, The New York Times
Kerry 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 w
It's stories like these that make me regret taking apart my IIgs to use for wall decorations. Well, at least I still have my Equity II.
Antisocial, shy people rejoice! Hide in your homes until you get discovered by a movie producer!!
uh no, getting "discovered" is exactly what us antisocial folk want to avoid. Just for that I'm going to dig an even deeper borrow!
Hide in my home until a movie producer finds me? Dude, the only producer who will ever 'find' me is one who decided to deliver pizzas for a night... otherwise, no way in hell I'd be discovered...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
The Trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/skycaptain andtheworldoftomorrow/
score for geeks and simpsons characters, but theres no way that movie will ever score with the public.
When I saw the preview in the theater nearly everyone looked at each other in shock and amusement. Some things just don't make good movies.
Will someone please take Michael out for a walk and change his water? i think they've chained him to the uber-secret slashdot console.
IAALS.
According to the article, Conran wasn't really hiding, she did show it to her boss, Jon Avnet, who decided to fund the production until they can find some bigger investors. And they did find Jude Law, and later signed Gwyneth Paltrow and eventually Angelina Jolie.
So the moral of the story is, if you really want to do something like that, make sure you don't just sit there and wait to be discovered, it will never happen until someone see your work.
And as a side note, there are many similar productions with no initial sponsors and low budget, yet able to pull it through at a much faster pace than 10 years - like Blair Witch Project.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
there's a couple of interviews with the principles behind this (producer, director, etc.) here and here. this definitely sounds like one very interesting film from a technical and artistic perspective.
I mean, it's a World War 1/2 Fighter Pilot Flying around against super-advanced aliens, all the while with the soundtrack as the Stargate SG-1 theme. The writer is a genius.
"...as they track down a mysterious mad scientist named Totenkopf..."
Hmmm, I can see a lot of people out there might get a wee bit pissed off about the fact that his scientist is named after the infamous SS Totenkopf (Death's Head) Division that ran... concentration camps.
Yes, I know it sounds cool, I know a lot of people might think I'm being picky and overtly PC, but Totenkopf isn't a German surname (Dr. Deaths Head!?), and I kinda wonder - given it's background - if the guy actually knows the history behind it.
I can picture someone saying this about The Lord of the Rings:
"Magic rings? Little guys with hairy feet? Twisted little trolls with multiple personality disorder. Please! Nyahhhh, gimme a babe with guns and big tits, yeah, that's adventure, HAWWW!"
If it's good, Sky Captain might be a moderately succussful popcorn movie. If not, it will be out of theaters in a week. But not because it's for geeks.
Stefan
I looked at this headline regarding the "world of tomorrow" and opened this story expecting specious futurism. Where is my specious futurism! There hasn't been a single story making dubious claims about technological revolutions right around the corner on slashdot all day.
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've been hiding at home all this time and no one has yet to discover me for my one handed web surfing skills.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
What about us non-anti-social people (also known as just, well, social people)? Will we never be in the movies?
First, don't compare this to Stargate (I know the music doesn't help) or Independence Day. Compare this to the Shadow, Hudsucker Proxy, or the Rocketeer. Second, remember this is one step away from indie. Yeah, I question the mainstream appeal. However, the story behind the movie will probably make me go see it.
I've seen bare stage interpretations of Shakespeare. This isn't that type of flick. However, seeing as how the last movie I've seen is the Segal-like Payback (sorry, Afflick's bravado reminds me of Under Siege), I don't know if this will be so bad. Yes, I know that we get caught up in CGI valhalla. However, this does speak a lot for effort.
Plus, remember the goal is to make money. Not necessarily rake in $300 million at the US box office.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Mod me down for being incorrect, but the music used in the trailer is EXACTLY the same music used for the opening of Stargate SG-1. Exactly.
I even went to my TiVo to confirm this, and yes they're the same. I can't believe that they would rip it so shamelessly.
- Sherman
Sorry, I was with you until your sig.
At my college, Sigma Pi was full of the elitist rich kids who partied right out of Animal House, giving the whole Greek system a bad name. (I think they finally lost their charter a couple years after I left.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
It looks good and all, but I just can't help but think it looks like Crimson Skies with giant robots :s
Moo!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Disgruntled and pendantic!
You work at Blockbuster don't you.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Hey, Neo Geo/SNK fans take what we can get nowadays.
No, the moral is:
if you promote your project enough, you may be able to work with a chick like Angolina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow 8-}
its my geek obligation to say this:
antisocial doesn't mean what everyone mean shy or withdrawn. antisocial is, say, if you went out and decided to throw molotov cocktails at your local high school band as they practice marching. if someone is shy they are withdrawn, antisocial is exactly what it means, against society. ie burning looting raping and maiming, anything to disrupt society.
The budget for this film is apparently $70M. I looked at the trailer - it looked like a cheesy rough sketch of Metropolis. Compare this budget to the $50M for Iron Giant or $15M for Spirited Away. I'm scratching my head wondering how this approach is either viable for independent productions or a demonstration of any new ground breaking CGI techniques.
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.
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
But padded bras don't jiggle! :-(
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.
But still a great movie. Not entirley original, had the obvious old pulp stories inspiration. Not that i cared at the time, i was just a little kid, even went as the Rocketeer for halloween. Spray painted 2 litre bottles and all...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The trailer has a nice style to it - sort of a Dick Tracey meets Laputa: Castle in the Sky feel. However, I wonder if the acting in the movie will pan out - we've already experienced the unfocused performances of actors who are acting without any environmental references in movies like Attack of the Clones. Although they're avoiding the problems with all-CG actors (ie, Final Fantasy), I'm wondering if they're going to run into problems marrying real actors with very stylized background plates that are more animation than special effects - to me, the style that I'm seeing is begging for animated characters, not live action...
The film, in other words, is one long special effect with Jude-Law-size holes in it.
Well, that's better than a lot of movies which have big enough holes in the plot that you could drive a truck through them.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
But the failures to quite ring the bell can be listed endlessly. .
Many, many have tried, but somehow. . . Even those black & white episodes of 'Voyager' were kinda dull despite all the clever and hard work put into them.
If "Sky Captain" can make the grade, it'll be interesting to see how.
I think it has something to do with replicating an old, albeit loved idea, versus taking a timeless formula and doing something with it which makes it vital to contemporary culture. Luke, Leia, Han and Indiana Jones and their worlds were all honest, first generation approaches to old and tired carbon copy ideas.
The difference will be if "Sky Captain's" director is a fan or a visionary.
Fans are stuck in idolizing yesterday. Visionaries are into the creation of the moment. Their beginnings may be the same, but their directions on the path of life are diametrically opposed.
Never work backwards. It's the same as falling asleep.
-FL
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.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You're kidding, right?
If anything, the "Slashbot" (by which I assume you're trying to imply majority opinion here) would be bemoaning CG in movies. Lucas killed Star Wars by making it all CG, after all! Go back to how movies were done with model kits and silly putty, damnit!
Read any story here about a movie other than Jackson's LOTR, and more often than not the comments will overwelmingly be critical about CG.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I can't understand why it is necessary to mention that he used to use an Apple in the ./ posting. I mean, is the implication that only Apple users are creative? That this somehow demonstrates how awesome Apple is? Surely there were other bits of information more relevant to the story that could have been placed in the summary.
The Apple conspiracy continues...
Read Pynchon.
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.
Like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within?
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
For instance, can you believe that Tron did not win any special effects academy awards because their 'overuse' of computer generated effects disqualified them??!
Uh, yes. That movie was horrible, special effects or no.
Heck, if you want to claim rip-off, then everyone has ripped off Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" back in, what, 1929?
--- Ban humanity.
Arrgh, that stinks. Fortunately, at least one animator who worked on Tron (Chris Wedge) went on to win an Academy Award for his computer animation work (Best Animated Short for "Bunny") :)
I've noticed this as well -- nice to hear someone else has too.
Conan the Barbarian theme used for the The Scorpion King trailer.
Miller's Crossing theme used in ??? (something fairly recent).
Terminator 2 theme used in the Universal Soldier trailer.
Hmmmm, I agree...
;o)
He would appear, from the article, to be just the visionary mentioned, though. Or at least that's my hope. He seems to really be striving for something to call his own. That's something that most geeks can really appreciate!
The film, in other words, is one long special effect with Jude-Law-size holes in it.
Kinda like Attack of the Clones or (don't blame me, I didn't ask to watch this) Spy Kids 3-D were? Yeah, I remember those monuments to modern filmmaking -- bluescreens and greenscreens! Practically no sets! Let your actors imagine everything they're supposed to be interacting with and they'll be much more compelling that way!
Didn't anybody listen when we complained that the acting in the new Star Wars films was painfully wooden, and the actors complained that it was because they were working on virtual sets and couldn't place themselves in the roles?
Look, would-be blockbuster-makers: this isn't the way to make a compelling movie. It may be pretty, but it doesn't work well. Go watch the behind-the-scenes stuff for The Lord of the Rings and look at how much trouble they went through to build sets and miniatures whenever possible, and then count the Oscar nominations and wins they got for their trouble. Spend the money on at least some kind of physical set and your actors will thank you for it.
It looks like good fun, although I believe the effectiveness of a few fifty caliber machine guns against alien giant robot spaceship alloys may have been wildly overrated in the movie...
We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before.
The idea is not merely to copy, but to expand the scope - to look at old ideas from new perspectives. This is invention at its best.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I think I must be one of the few here (even on /.) who saw "Doc Savage: Man of Bronze" in the theater.
But I was more of a "Grey Avenger" fan, in any case.
Chip H.
The creators may not have been influenced by Miyazaki at all. Miyazaki's works are recent. The director has clearly stated the Fleischer Brothers' "Mechanical Monsters" (1941) as the source material for the robots - this animation was the original inspiration for the robots in Miyazaki's "Laputa" and "Lupin III: Castle Castigliostro". The lone aviation hero with the masked face is a staple of 1930's pulp films (as are invading robots, for that matter).
Japanese animation borrowed heavily from US 1930's and 1940's culture (not surprising considering our domination of their culture at the end of WWII). Don't confuse the source (1930's-1940's pulp) with the derivative work (anime).
The entire entertainment world does not revolve around anime.
-Mod how you like, we'll make more
The music from "Midnight Run" is used on about a quarter of the trailers I've ever seen. The music is very catchy, some twangy guitars and harmonica: you wouldn't listen to a whole CD of it at once, but it works great over the kind of bits and pieces that comprise a trailer. :7)
The original film was fantastic. And when my college roommate turned out to own the album, I was delighted.
In fact, I hear the music a lot more now than I ever hear the movie itself mentioned, which is too bad: DeNiro and Charles Grodin, with Dennis Farina as an awseome mobster, and Joe Pantoliano before he started showing up under every Hollywood rock you turned over, plus Yaphet Kotto as Angent Foster Grant.
*sigh*
Man, I love that movie.
How many times do we need to suffer posts ike this one?!?! Laputa ripped off Jules Verne. The steampunk, pulp noir genres have been around for eons. Go get an education in cinema. Start with Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Miyazaki owes him more than you'd care to admit I'm guessing. Besides that it's been done better than Miyazaki. Laputa was pretty, but that's about it.
TotenKopf can just as easily be translated as "Deadhead". So get in the spirit and smoke a bowl just before watching the movie; you'll be happy you did!
Okay, I'll bite. What do pendants have to do with anything?
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
Man, I forgot about that show. I really enjoyed that one, actually. Too bad it ended prematurely. The main actor died on set in an accident, apparently. I bet it could have gone on to become a big cultural phenomenon if things had been different.
-FL