The Digital Eye: Sky Captain as an Indie VFX Prescription for Tomorrow
As a box office performer, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is nothing to write home about. Eight weeks after its release on Sept. 17, the sci-fi pic had earned only about $47 million worldwide. This on a production and marketing budget that topped $100 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
As a harbinger of the future of filmmaking, however, this film is a blockbuster.
The visual effects-heavy film — the first major feature to be shot almost entirely in front of a bluescreen — was dreamed up by a comparatively penniless kid at CalArts, who happened to be very handy with Macs and HD cameras.
So what’s to prevent another massively creative kid from creating his own eye-popping feature film? Absolutely nothing. And that has huge implications for how films are made and marketed, and how filmmakers are discovered.”Anyone with the creative wherewithal and a computer in front of them — even a high school student — could create a piece that could catch the eye of a studio executive,” said Darin Hollings, visual effects supervisor for Sky Captain.
OK, I’m leaving out a few key facts about Sky Captain. Kerry Conran, the CalArts kid who dreamed up the movie, and his brother, Kevin Conran, managed to enlist some heavy hitters for the film: producer Jon Avnet, who optioned it and sunk the first significant cash into the project; Aurelio De Laurentiis, who financed it; Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, who starred in it; and Paramount, which acquired it.
Once Paramount grabbed the film, 14 visual effects companies from around the world jumped on board, including Stan Winston Studios, ILM, Pixel Liberation Front, Hybride and R!ot.
But even if Paramount hadn’t grabbed it, the Conrans were prepared to make the film on their own “with completely no name actors and to do it over one or two years” on a shoe string budget, Hollings said.
They could have done it, too. By shooting in digital high-definition, they had a product that could instantly be edited on a computer, without the cumbersome process of scanning film. And because they shot virtually every scene in front of a bluescreen, they were able to dispense with prop design, expensive on-location shoots, lighting concerns and many of the other details that bedevil films. About 90% of the frames had visual effects — from the airplanes to Shangri-la backdrops to those monstrous robots.
Had the Conrans done it on their own, they wouldn’t have had as polished a film. And they certainly wouldn’t have had the distribution and marketing power Paramount gave them. But they could have self-distributed the film to independent theaters or cut directly to DVD.
Or the Conrans could have sold the film AFTER they completed it. That would have saved Paramount around $70 million in added production costs.
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