Kerry Scott Conran is an American film director and screenwriter, best known for creating and directing the 2004 pulp science fiction film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Early life and influences Conran was born in Flint, Michigan. He was educated at the California Institute of the Arts. He grew up watching such classic adventure movies and serials as King Kong, Lost Horizon, Metropolis, and Flash Gordon on a local television channel. He was impressed by the whimsy and imagination of these films. He explained in an interview with John Joseph Adams that the adventure films of the 1930s era were not limited by what was practical, but only by the imaginations of the creators. He stated that he found this element lacking in most modern adventure films, which he described as "almost too well informed... and more cynical". As a result, he had aspired ever since his childhood to create an adventure film or serial in the same vein as the aforementioned escapist adventures of the 1930s. He spent much of his childhood making short super-8 movies. Upon becoming an adult, he entered the California Institute of Arts. Although he was enrolled in a live-action course, he became enamored with the abilities of those in animation courses to create whatever was in their imagination. He realized that they were not bound by such things as practicality or the rules of physics, but only by their imaginations. As a result, he devised the idea of making a film with live actors, but computer-animated backgrounds. Career When he had fully figured out how he was going to go about making the movie, he enlisted the help of his brother Kevin and a few friends. At first, he planned to make a feature-length seven-chapter serial, which he would release independently. He eventually decided to make only a six-minute teaser instead, as it would take him several decades to create the backgrounds for a full-length feature. He set up a blue-screen in his apartment, and some of his friends acted in the roles. He created the backgrounds for the black and white short over the course of four years with his Mac computer. He could not afford better equipment, so he used equipment given him in payment for projects that he worked on, such as desktop publishing of articles. His computer (including the equipment he earned) was outdated and slow. He dropped