Harry Knowles, on his Ain’t It Cool News site, describes The World of Tomorrow as a must-see deco sci-fi masterpiece with giant robots. That caught my attention. One of his readers caught a few unfinished minutes of it in New York, and “apparently it was shot entirely against blue screen on digital video by a first time director.” Interesting. Here are some more in-depth comments:
And, even in rough form, it looks fantastic.Like “Down With Love” was a 60s-style movie shot like a 60s movie, World looks almost exactly like a 1930s sci-fi flick. The fact that the backgrounds and other elements look hand-drawn actually adds rather than detracts from the appeal. This could be the first example of a movie in which the stiff and artificial look that the blue screen creates actually improves the overall effect. It reminded me of an Alan Moore comic come to life (Giant robots walking down the streets of Art Deco Manhattan? Awesome)
Since I’d seen and heard nothing about it, I looked it up on Yahoo! Movies and found out some technical details:
The Los Angeles Times has revealed that Kerry Cornan is a CalArts graduate, and his software is a CGI program that allows him to shoot his entire movie against blue screens, and fill in the backgrounds later with images he’s been working on for years, which are mostly already done. What this allows Conran to do, which is what is so revolutionary, is to have an already existing 3-D storyboard of every scene, with stick figures in place where the actors are supposed to be. Now, all he has to do is stick in his cast, and he’s basically done, it sounds like.