If you haven’t seen a trailer for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, go check one out now. It looks, I think, like no other movie I’ve ever seen.
What makes Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow so revolutionary and has Hollywood wondering anxiously about the future is the fact that it was filmed without a single set. The flesh-and-blood stars, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, were filmed in an empty studio in front of a blank blue-screen background. Everything else, apart from a few minor props such as a ray gun, was generated by computer and added in months later.
It’s obviously a throwback to the films of the 30s and 40s, and the muted tones of the film reflect that. It’s not so much black and white as sepia and grey. The fact that it’s so stylized no doubt helps to hide the fact that there’s no set. Maybe in a few years we’ll see ads before movies soliciting donations for out-of-work scenic carpenters. Another industry outmoded by the computer. Hee, hee, hee.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
This is just another tool in the filmmaker’s toolbox, not a model for every film every time. Contrary to what you may think, carpenters, set designers, and set decorators (or their analogues) are still required. There’s no library of 40s Furturism clip-art sets, so these things still cost a lot of money to build. While the price may ultimately be less than the real-world construction costs for something like “Sky Captain” or “Lord of the Rings,” it would be a huge waste of money for something that could be easily filmed on existing locations.
As to whether the use of blue-screen-only is a creative boon, consider that “Star Bores Episode 2” had plenty of scenes that were shot entirely on blue-screen. It didn’t help the film any.
Movies are going to change Big Time in the near future. It won’t be very long that Gollum in LOTR looks crude, and at some point not too long after that, human actors will fade away.
The ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast was once very expensive state of the art. It could be rendered on any desktop machine now.
Ten years, twenty years… at some point, it will be ridiculously easy for a movie maker to buy preprogrammed characters and sets. It’s very expensive now. It won’t be for long.
Yep, and PIXAR will be the company that makes it.
Take a look at all those PIXAR films (Toy Story, Monsters Inc. etc.). They never miss an opportunity to stick in something gratuitously photorealistic and somewhat out of place. For an example take a look at the detail on the Daschhund in Toy Story 2 or the water effects and scene complexity in Finding Nemo.My guess is they are honing their skills for something altogether different from kids cartoons in the future. We know for sure they can tell a story……
It looks, I think, like no other movie I’ve ever seen.
Check out “Immortel”
http://www.immortel-lefilm.com/
– similar set up, even worse acting, visually attractive. No Angeline Jolie with an eyepatch though, ahhrrr.