Getting Sky Captain Off The Ground

Three Editors and a Kona Card Save the Day

Starring Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, Sky Captain pays homage to such influences as Buck Rogers and Fritz Lang. But the ambitious Paramount release, which was independently produced by Jon Avnet, doesn’t just look fondly backwards to the matinee serial adventures of the’30s and’40s.

It is the first major motion picture that has been created "using a totally digital world as its background," notes first assistant editor Erik Jessen. "A lot of Star Wars [Episode II: Attack of the Clones] used digital backgrounds, but not the whole film. And Sky Captain is highly stylized and very comic-book in nature. When I saw an early screening I came away thinking, ‘This is the closest a movie can be to a comic book.’"

Editing Sky Captain, which was shot in HD on soundstages in London, has been a monumental task. "For a start, we put together a company, WOT, for‘ World of Tomorrow,’ and an entire visual effects team just for the production," he reports. "Initially, all the visual effects were going to be done in house, but no one realized just how intense that and the editing process would become."

Jessen says that when the project began, it was planned to do most of the film using 2D — "basically using photos for the backgrounds and then shooting the actors in front of them," he explains. "But as it grew, it became much more 3D intensive, and that was a major turning point in the project. The budget increased substantially and it all became a much bigger deal, especially in editing."

As it turns out, it has taken a team of three— editor Sabrina Plisco, Jessen and assistant editor Tim Coulter— to pull the project together. " Tim did a lot of the editing on stage in London, and Sabrina came on right before shooting," says Jessen. "They shot around the end of 2002, and basically we’ve been working on the editing ever since."

Back in LA at the WOT offices, Jessen digitized the tapes sent over from the London shoot using a Sony HDW-F500 deck and AJA’s Kona HD capture card— which was, when the production started using it, the only HD capture solution that worked under OS X, according to Jessen. In fact, the Kona card was so new that, in order to get hold of it, WOT became a beta user for several months. "And it worked beautifully," Jessen reports.

"The speed of being able to acquire the digital format using Kona was pretty impressive," he continues. Speed was important because the 2D compositing team had to key out the blue screens in every shot in the movie featuring live actors. "If we’d shot on film and done all the effects on film it would have been so expensive and time consuming, as we would have had to scan all the footage. But by using the HD Kona card, we could bring all the footage directly into our workflow and right into the computer and onto our server. So we could create a low-res version of all the footage and then use that in our offline cut. Then, when we decided that a particular take was going to be used in the final film, the capture footage using the Kona card was given to the visual effects team, and they started using it there."

Once the visual effects team had worked on a version of the shot, Jessen would then bring it back into Final Cut Pro. "The shot was then assessed," he adds, "and it was a slow progression sometimes. But it needed to be viewed in HD also, so we could also play the HD out of the Kona card to an HD monitor, and then the director and visual effects supervisor could assess it critically. And every comp that came in was looked at through an HD card on an HD monitor before being approved."

Those files were then rendered out in high resolution and fed into a Nucoda system. "All the digital frames were put together there, and then they were sent over to Efilm to be shot on film," he says.

In terms of visual effects, the original plan was to do "every single shot" in house, reports Jessen. "But when it became such a big project and the release date changed, in order to keep on schedule we decided to farm out about half of the effects shots." Ultimately, ILM, Rising Sun, Ring of Fire, Stan Winston Digital, Gray Matter, Pacific Title and Luma Pictures all contributed. "We’d give them our Maya animation files and they’d start texturing and lighting and doing final compositing," he says.

Summing up, Jessen says that "without the film’s digital environment and without being able to use something like AJA’s Kona card, Sky Captain would never have got off the ground. After all, we go to all these places like Nepal and New York’s Radio City Music Hall, and we’re flying planes down Sixth Avenue while giant robots are pounding down the street— how else are you going to do that kind of thing? And it also gave the film a certain uniformity, which it needed. Visually, it’s like a comic book come to life, and I think audiences are going to be amazed."