All the World's a Blue Print

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is one of my guilty pleasures.



I’ve watched it at least a dozen times and it’s mostly because of the dreamy 1930’s Art Deco design of the thing. I was watching the director’s commentary recenty, which was about how the movie was filmed almost entirely on a “blue screen” sound stage in England, and all the scenery, sets and giant robots were made in a computer. Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow are walking through Shangri-La and Kerry Konran would keep saying “nothing is really here.” “Nothing in this scene is real”. “None of this is actually here”. It was a Buddhist chant.

And then we came to this scene in Radio City Music Hall where Gwyneth bends down to pick up a blueprint (of giant robots). The blueprint is actually resting on a blue screen because “nothing is real”, and they added in the distinctive Radio City Music Hall carpet via the computer. But the blueprint is ALSO a “blue screen”. That blew my mind. The blueprint is a fractal manifestation of our blue screen computer consciousness. As above, so below.

In blue screen movie making, the blue background is made transparent in a concept similar to making a transparent GIF. Then the awesome background is composited in, and voila, we have giant robots in Manhattan or anything else you want.

Here, I’ve taken the original image with the blueprint, and crudely removed the carpet to reveal the blue screen, and then replaced it with another carpet that you may find familiar.

The color blue is actually the color “transparent”, the color our mind uses to reflect our illusions back on us. Blue sky ideas becoming real in the theater of the mind. The whole movie is about the SKY Captain, and it’s filmed entirely on SKY blue screen. This is their motto:

Ille Caelum Fremitus - "Those who roar to the sky"

I vainly paint blue circles on the walls and expect to walk through them. All I get is a blue nose.

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SYNC NOTES:

“The way Obama handled Castro is a new blueprint for dealing with dictators.” -Quartz

Shiva and most of the Hindu pantheon are blue. Shiva is the destroyer of the world of illusion.

I got an email today from someone who has a 1955 catamaran designed by famous designer Woody Brown: “I also have the blueprints”.

My Blue Dream.