Jude Law, who also served as co-producer, and Gwyneth Paltrow try to ignite Hawksian sparks as rivals and ex-lovers.

But Avnet and Conran were both adamant that Sky Captain would play it straight and innocent just like the Saturday morning serials of the era. Yet the computer animators appear to be having a blast as they painstakingly layer in the virtual sets, backgrounds, vehicles, creatures and action sequences in 3D.

“Process-wise, the first thing we did is Kerry had a script, so we sent Kerry and the script to London where he had a read-through with all the actors,” Hollings recounts. “We took that audio into an editing package and had a few artists do storyboards for the entire movie. So, we started off with a bit of storyboards and cut all the boards to the audio. Then, step-by-step, knowing that we were going to shoot the entire movie on bluescreen, we made a 3D animatic in Maya for every shot in the movie… what that gave us is real-world information on how to shoot the shot — exact lenses, camera positions, how far distance-to-subject…

The mechanized retro visual style of Sky Captain is evident in the design of the killer robots, sets and lighting.

“So I developed a system very much like a Thomas Bros. map and I built the stages we were going to use in London. I made a digital model, made a grid on the floor… numbers one way, letters the other way, so for every single shot, we made a map from our 3D animatics… and I had a survey team and so we knew what were doing every day before we went in there. I could even know ahead of time if they were going to go off the bluescreen. Once I made all these maps, the D.P. [Eric Adkins] wasn’t very happy about them because what he cared about was where the light was coming from and what I cared about was where the camera and bluescreen were.

“What we did on stage here is run-throughs with doubles for a lot of the movie — a Jude double and a Gwyneth double. Shot the whole movie in HD with a Sony [HDW-F900 CineAlta 24P] camera and Fuji zoom lens, so we calculated all the stuff to make sure our distances were proper. Shot half the movie right here and tested our theories about how the movie was going to come together. Every shot wasn’t exactly how the animatic was, so we had to track it and replot those cameras and build all the environments, texture map all the environments, render the environments, etc. Then it’s pretty standard digital effects from there where you’re putting bluescreened actors against either a photographic background or 3D background… and pretty standard composition and tracking after that.”

Hollings adds that one of the interesting things about Sky Captain is that Conran had initially predicted that about 70% of the backgrounds were going to be photographic. “In the end, we found that just getting those photographs and finding those environments wasn’t what he wanted. To achieve his vision, we had to build most of this movie in 3D.” However, for an early Radio City Music Hall scene (where The Wizard of Oz is playing), Adkins and Hollings spent a day shooting all the background plates. Adkins then shot Paltrow in London, which went faster than building virtual environments in 3D and making them look real (with the help of the FreeForm PHANTOM Omni haptic device for sculpting 3D designs).

The production team animated in Maya (with the 3D department running the software on PCs to exploit the strengths of each platform), composited in black and white in After Effects and rendered in RenderMan. “The advantages to compositing in black and white began with the fact that we wanted to make a black-and-white film. Throwing out all the color issues let us focus on tone and composition first — then focusing on all the color issues separately. Our elements were in so many different color spaces so it made sense to make that a separate issue. Putting the black-and-white comp first and then laying the color over resulted in a very unique look and gave us a solid process to work with that Kerry was happy with.”

Bill Desowitz is the editor of VFXWorld.