Kerry Conran and his world of tomorrow. All images ™ & © 2004 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.

Kerry Conran has been intrigued with the blending of animation and live-action ever since he was a film student at CalArts in the late `80s. Haunted by an incomplete student project along those lines, he was determined to realize his dream with an action-adventure feature that paid homage to the Fleischer Superman cartoons and movie serials of the `30s. So he experimented for several years on a Mac in his Sherman Oaks apartment with a six-minute short that would eventually serve as the basis for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the pulp sci-fi actioner with killer robots starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie. The $70 million-plus indie pickup by Paramount Pictures, financed by Filmauro and producer Jon Avnet, opens Sept. 17 after much fanfare as the most elaborate bluescreen shot and composited feature ever made. Conran recently talked with VFXWorld about the challenges of making Sky Captain as well as plans he has for his second feature, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars.

Bill Desowitz: The obvious question is why make Sky Captain this way?

Kerry Conran: The real reason was that it was the only way possible to make a film with limited resources [in our Van Nuys studio]. And where it started and what it evolved into was slightly different. But it resulted in enormous savings in both expense and time for the principal photography. When I got out of film school, I was looking for a way to make an independent film that had some scope to it, and around that time I was looking at the tools that were available. It wasn’t more than a year or so that the first caller Macintosh had been introduced, and it was well before the modern effects film had come along — The Phantom Menace, The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings. The idea of doing something wholesale like this was at the time prohibitively expensive for the effects community or for Hollywood. Strangely, I think, if they had tried to enlist the services of ILM or somebody to do what I was proposing, it would’ve been impossible. But for someone to take those same tools and do it on their own, it certainly was possible. So it took four years of developing a method that borrowed the techniques of 2D cel animation and I tried to use compositing to essentially facilitate the same effect in live action.

BD: What did you use for software in the beginning?

KC: At the time, there was a piece of software that had just came out called After Effects. And to me it was analogous to the animation kit stand or optical printer in a way, and just suggested live action in a way that wasn’t possible in the past. I just knew that if I wanted to shoot in New York City or the Himalayas, that I could do it without ever leaving my apartment, essentially, and go for a more stylized look with something that I could achieve with some measure of production value on my own. And that’s really where it all began.

BD: What were the major adjustments when you finally went into production on the feature in Van Nuys?

KC: It became more ambitious in scale. It went from a black-and-white film to a color film. It went from a film that I was going to shoot entirely in front of a bluescreen to a soundstage in London at Elstree, where Star Wars was made. It was a film that originally wasn’t intended to have any stars. But at heart, at core, nothing really changed in terms of how we were going to do it. It was just a little more than I had started. Principally, it was founded on and executed with the same spirit as the short film.