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Sky Captain and the Films of Tomorrow
professorfalcon writes "Foxnews.com has an interview with the stars of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. They talk about their experience hugging a green screen for the entire film, and how the movie is 'unlike anything most audiences have seen before. It uses no sets, only computer generated imagery.' So most audiences didn't see Star Wars?"
What's better...
Sky Captain
Star Wars
Sex with a wookie
Sex with a mare
as far as sci-fi flics go. The backgrounds seem blurry and a bit off-sync with the characters. It's a good start - maybe in 5 years they'll get this blue-screen technology right - and maybe one day they will not need actors either.
Star Wars had sets with some green screen work.
... even more green screen work.
Sky Captain has green screen work with
This is the future of special effects movies, because of the creative freedom and reduced costs. The hardest part will be for actors to have something to act against. I think this gets solved by creating preliminary computer models as part of the concept art and using it to show the actors, in realtime, what they're interacting with.
...like mentioning World War One in 1939. And strobe flash photography.
I enjoyed the look and feel of the film, and Paltrow (a lot), and the luscious close-ups, but the story was just LAME. The film treated pre-WWI Germany as if it were Nazi Germany -- totally different kettles of fish.
On the other hand the last two words of the movie were hilarious.
actually at a special presentation which I was fortunate enough to attend, Gweneth Paltrow and Jude Law said that the lack of sets "freed" them in their acting. The fact that they had an animatic of the entire film that they used as reference before every take allowed them to "hit their marks" more easily and allowed them to be more creative in their acting. It was like theater acting on a bare set.
As far as the audience reaction, this film was deliberately made in a stylized form. In fact they processed it in black and white and recolorized it to give an old movie feel! (They also didn't use the state of the art capture technology, just plain old Sony HD-CAM 1440x960, 3:1:1, 8bit). It is clear from many other recent motion pictures that they could have made it appear as realistic as they wanted but chose not to.
The main reason why it IS the future is because it is thought that it cost about 1/3 what it would have been if they had shot it on "real" sets! Hate to say it but saving more than $80 million dollars (estimated cost of the film $40M-$70M) would drive any producer to making his film this way, regardless of actor preference or (most) audience reactions.
I guess this started with Return of the Jedi, when, in order to keep the story ending secret to the last minute, he shot the actors doing really ambiguous stuff, to insure they could not figure it out.
;-)
I've turned very cynical about Lucas, I'm thinking he probably was shooting stuff until he figured it out
Reminds me of Psycho though, all the actors had to sign strict NDAs so the secret punch wouldn't get out before the movie was released. Of course, society has done a very thourough job of spoiling that for the rest of eternity now, so the wisdom of the NDA about the shower scene was in retrospect quite undenyable.
Off-topicish rant: Planet of the apes, they released a version where the punch is ON THE FREAKING COVER. Jeez...
You can't take the sky from me...
I also ended up getting bored. I just couldn't stop thinking "This looks like one of those 'interactive movies' computer games from the nineties.
The CG wasn't even that good, in some scenes the Doom 3 engine could have rendered more convincing backgrounds.
Plus the actors didn't seem like they wanted to be there.
The biggest hole in the movie though: Where is everyone? It seems like the main actors are the only people that populate this world. Polly would run around the streets but no one else is to be seen.
I really appreciate the style that the director was aiming for, but it just didn't seem to hold up over two hours.
George Lucas and Spielberg made Indiana Jones as an homage to old serials, but at least they pushed the format forward, sky captain seems to push it backwards, yuch.
The upcoming Sin City (based on Frank Miller's graphic novel series, and it's directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller) uses a similar filmmaking technique as "Sky Captain," although not to the same degree. An FAQ is here.
:)
Compare the behind-the-scenes footage to the trailer that was shown at this summer's San Diego Comic-Con (they had originally posted a 640x480 version but it's been replaced by a 480x272 version).
Check it out (there's a brief topless scene, so it's not SFW), if only for the shots of Jessica Alba dancing around seductively in leather chaps.
"Even given the technology, how many people/effects teams out there are going to have the talent and skill necessary to create and animate a convincing CG actor doing a good, convincing CG performance? Plus you'll still need good voice actors."
You're forgetting technological improvement. And it won't take "decades" (well, maybe one or two.) The computer hardware and software available by another ten or twenty years will be so good any director will be able to order up any kind of character he wants, AND tweak scenes as he likes, AND generate voiceovers with any emotional content he wants.
Of course, this will result in a lot of bad movies as bad directors ignore the interplay of real actors for their own obsessive interpretation of the movie (see: Lucas, George).
However, good directors will be able to produce great movies exactly as they want them for less money.
Net effect will be like the introduction of word processing on computers: some great documents, and a lot of over-fonted crap.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
And to the average proprietary company, the only thing that really counts as innovation is making a half-assed, incomplete copy of some half-assed, incomplete prototype from academia, slapping software and design patents on it, and suing the crap out of anyone who complains.
Really cool visuals, decent story.
Putting someone as famous as Angelina Jolie in the role she played was a complete waste. She had like 10 minutes of total screen time, and any attractive actress would have done fine as that character. Having said that, she did look hot (though I could have done without the eye patch).
Gwyneth Paltrow looked stunning-- the 30s fashions and styles were very becoming.
And for once, it was nice to see Giovanni Ribisi in a role where he's not so annoying I'd like to slap the shit out of him.
I've always wondered why they can't use some type of surface that is sensitive to infrared or ultra violet (or possibly emitting one of those non visible wavelengths). If they could find a way to split the image into a 2nd camera that was sensitive to one of those frequencies, they could then shoot with the actors wearing just about any color and be able to mask out the background perfectly. I guess it's probably too technically involved.
Plus, the Lord of the Rings trilogy were some of the most successful movies ever to heavily use CG, but just as much energy seems to have been put into finding good locations, creating elaborate and convincing physical sets, and finding the right flesh-and-blood actors.
The reason why The Lord of the Rings movies are so well-liked was the fact they used as many natural locations as possible to provide a background to "layer" in the CGI effects. A good example is the from The Fellowship of the Ring when they were travelling down the Anduin River; much of the background is CGI, but that was in addition to scenes filmed at various locations in New Zealand itself.
I'm sure there are more, these are just little bits I picked up on.