In the end, 14 visual effects companies helped bring the explosive world of Sky Captain to life.

BD: You also mentioned at SIGGRAPH that you preferred the black-and-white because the nature of the vintage color looks more dated.

KC: I think so. I think at times it evokes those Victorian hand-painted photographs and to me I relate that to older. If you look at any black-and-white film into the `50s and `60s when color was available, it was easier to [evoke the past]. For me, it was done [in color] for commercial reasons to make it more palatable, to modernize it, but, in fact, it may have had a different result.

BD: It must’ve been very challenging to work with the number of visual effects houses that were outsourced, supervised by Scott Anderson. I counted 13 that contributed nearly 50% of the 2,000 effects. [ILM, Luma Pictures, Rising Sun Pictures, Hybride Technologies, Ring of Fire, SW Digital, Pixel Liberation Front, Pacific Title Digital, Café FX, Engine Room, The Orphanage, R!OT and Digital Backlot.]

KC: We did make the deliberate choice of only handing out entire scenes, so you didn’t have one company sharing Nepal with another company. And in some instances that might’ve only meant the animation — they couldn’t do the compositing. And it was really there that we were able to maintain consistency from scene to scene, and with the film we took great measure to work with each of these companies, who really worked hard knowing they had this incredible challenge of mixing and matching. And we created essentially keyframes for them that we composited as if we were going to do the scene so they had a reference point that would be like if we had done it. We also had given each company about three shots that we had already done — the elements for them — and asked them to duplicate them, seeing our final result so they got used to it. And we were able to see very quickly how close they were able to come on their own. And then our guys… were in direct contact with them and it was a really fluid, free exchange of information… so that it would all look like the same movie.

BD: So how close did you come to realize what was in your imagination?

KC: Well, you know, on the one hand, it’s close. Like anyone else, I would’ve liked more time to perfect certain things, but I’m quite happy. But one of the great things that came out of this that I wasn’t even thinking of was the opportunity to work with such amazing artists, and what they brought to the film…

Lessons learned on Sky Captain will be brought onto Conran’s next outing, A Princess of Mars.

BD: What next? A Princess of Mars?

KC: Yes.

BD: And how will it be different in approach?

KC: Just the look and feel of the John Carter world would be meant to feel a little more realistic.

BD: And you’ll be shooting on actual locations…

KC: Right. I think it will be a combination… The things we learned on World of Tomorrow were significant and this will be something of a hybrid. Instead of 100% of what he did on World of Tomorrow it could be 50%. But then I think there are certain things that the computer is not best suited at right now when you try to mimic certain kind of environments, be they organic. The difference is that the onus is not on the John Carter series. It’s a different kind of animal. But it will be the beneficiary of what we did on World of Tomorrow in a big way.

BD: How are you adapting it?

KC: We are essentially trying to be as faithful as we can to the Burroughs book. We won’t be reinterpreting it but adapting what Burroughs wrote in screenplay form. John Carter is sort of immortal and where it would begin is approaching modern day, but he is still a Civil War veteran and all that would be intact. Obviously there are certain things that have to be done to translate it to the sensibilities of today’s audience.