Word: screens
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...insanity. If Paramount hadn't given first-time director Kerry Conran $40 million to make the action movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow with Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow (opening Sept. 17), Conran would still be filming his brother acting out scenes in front of a blue screen in his apartment, then staying up all night turning that footage into a giant-robot movie on his Macintosh. He would have been that guy in your IT department you go to only when no one else is around...
From 1996 to 2000, Conran, 37, lived with a weatherman's 14-ft.-tall blue screen clogging up his living room. "It was absurd. You just had to look at it and laugh," he says. It was, to put it kindly, not the kind of thing you want a woman to see when she comes over on a first date. "That assumes you have a date," says Conran. "I was working nonstop on this thing." After four years of monklike devotion to the dream of making a Bruckheimer-size sci-fi flick without leaving his apartment, Conran had completed...
...persuaded Law, Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Giovanni Ribisi to sign up for a vintage-looking film about a pilot and a tagalong reporter saving the world from an evil genius. "It's a rare chance we get to do something completely original artistically," says Jolie. "People use blue screen to cheat or enhance a little, but he had a film in his head that could only be done with all the newest technology. We made a whole new type of film, mixing old and new styles. It's a piece of art with its own unique texture...
...only arty texture stuff the actors got to do was minimalist theater in front of a blue screen in a Van Nuys, Calif., warehouse, stooping when Conran yelled "Duck!" and pretending they were interacting with everything from dirigibles to a desk to a shaky hologram of a digitally resurrected Laurence Olivier (another actor voiced his new lines). George Lucas and others have created scenes in front of blue screens before, but Conran was the first to try to build absolutely everything nonhuman on the computer. It's the anti--Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with Conran leaving holes for the actors...
Will the strategy work? Only if those iPod owners open their wallets. The new iMac starts at $1,300 for the smaller model with a 17in. screen and goes up to $1,900 for the 20in. screen. That's less than its predecessors but a bit more than the $250 to $500 iPods...