It's a blue world out here. No, I mean it, a completely blue world. For a number of the pick-ups being shot this week at Leavesden, the actors are surrounded by great expanses of blue screen material and sometimes nothing else at all--no sets, no backgrounds, nothing. This setup will allow the actors to be newly composited into existing scenes, joining characters filmed earlier, or into environments that will be created entirely as visual effects--cityscapes and exotic planets yet to take form.

So right now, we're looking at a lot of blue. Vast curtains two stories high cover walls over a hundred feet long. Giant scaffoldings have been concealed. Even parts of the ceiling are draped in the cloth. Sometimes vehicles or set pieces on which the actors sit or stand are simple constructions painted in the universal color. Within the visual effects process, everything blue will disappear, to be filled in by the rest of the scene.

Somehow, the Blue doesn't come across as nothing, because we know what's ahead in the filming process. It comes across as anything--everything. For both actors and crew, the blue here symbolizes complete imagination. Lit by its special-spectrum lights, it glows with a strange and distinctive radiance, like a vibrant and fluorescent wall of energy. The blue feels like it might be a doorway, to somewhere else. People stay clear of it. Until the shots are all finalled out, within the blue lie infinite possibilities. The great swaths of the color surrounding us only emphasize how imaginative this film is going to be. So yes--Episode I: it's a blue world.