In the spirit of scratches, it was only at a recent 70mm film screening that I spotted the rig used for the floating pen scene as Floyd falls asleep in the shuttle.
As the weightlessness begins, his pen floats away - if you look really really carefully you can spot that it’s actually embedded in a thin plastic film which is rotating about an axis, given away by minute scratches on its surface.
They literally taped the pen to a sheet of glass, which they rotated around. As low-tech as it gets but it looks wonderful, except I guess for the scratches you spotted.
BTW, there is a YouTube user (1) that has created "video loops" that look like these displays from the film that you could use as a screensaver or what-have-you. Very cool.
This was an interesting tidbit about the film but my guess is, even if I did process the scratches, they'd probably register as glitches or something, due to radiation or who knows what. At some level it seems consistent with the plot thread surrounding HAL.
I think the "perfectionist" is social and Hollywood (and tabliod/lawsuit) cover for "this person abuses people on set." In Kubrick's case it certainly was, famously with Duvall in the Shining, but rumored with other talent too.
Even after it was called out, and after looking at it, it still looks like a low res planet crescent or other attempts to make animated logo graphics. Why are we sure that wasn't the intent?
These computer screens, readouts in 2001 are fascinating - there's focus on the information, a little bit of graphic there and here and nothing else. Probably HAL manages the rest.
If AI will become the basic form of interaction with computers then perhaps our interfaces will be simplified as well - at least for the mass-market end users.
The other GUI I really like is MAGI from Evangelion - all these black screens with classic amber color accompanied by red, green and teal fit very well together - especially with the volumetric-holographic displays from new tetralogy
Now I have to watch it again. How did I never notice.. ?
I thought this was going to be about the other scratches that are visible in the film: the ones on the piece of glass that is used to create the illusion of a floating pen. I never noticed that until I saw my first screening of a pristine 70 mm print in a smallish theater. I was hoping to read about that and any other physical scratches I might have missed.
Wow, it hadn’t even occurred to me to think that in 1965 they wouldn’t have had computer monitors capable of displaying those images, and would have had to fake it by projecting the image from behind.
This seems to require some preexisting knowledge on forensics of scratches on film reels, or something, and I have trouble following the article. Is there a TL;DR of what exactly the main message is, is there anything special proven by these scratches or anything that's different than other films?
For me a central message that comes out really well is that Kubrick created flat screen computer graphics by back projecting manually prepared films onto the screens. In other words, although the space parts of 2001 were full of computer screens, none of these were actual computer output.
Admittedly this is a bit buried in the discussion about the scratches but it was fascinating nevertheless.
Fascinating to imagine all the 16mm projectors hanging off the back of the consoles in order to simulate what would, many decades later, be a 1/8" thick OLED display.
I still think that was a rather prescient glimpse of the future of technology for 1968 (or earlier when art production began). Was that "common knowledge" in the sci-fi community back then? That future displays would be flat, thin, rectangular? I am thinking that the book Fahrenheit 451 had wall-sized TV screens so perhaps that was already a popular perception of the future.
Interestingly the 1982 Bladerunner used CRTs for many of its computer terminals which (to me) give it a somewhat dated look - the screens have noticeable curves
Bowman and Poole are effectively using/watching tablet computers at a couple points early in the movie. It’s an eye opener comparing that to the much lower budget computer stuff in the eighties sequel, filmed by a different director. Lots of CRTs and wireframe graphics.
The fact that the scratches always appear within the confines of one of the computer displays indicates they occurred on one of the many 16 mm loops used in rear projection to fill the screens with animated readouts. Because of the color of the scratches, it is possible to infer they occurred on the emulsion side of the 16 mm film
> anything that's different than other films?
It’s not like there were a ton of films simulating a sophisticated computer display by playing a separate little film inside a frame.
He is mentioned in the article but they left off Silent Running (1972) as one of his credits. Perhaps they think it is lesser known?
Also mentioned, Brian Johnson — but they leave off that he was The Special Effects Guy behind the TV series Space 1999.
Brian's comment in the article about "blimping" the projectors to cut down the noise is an interesting throw-back to when they would wrap a camera or projector in some kind of throw-together enclosure to try to block the noise it made. I believe in addition to using padding to dampen the sound, they sometimes used thin lead sheets to build the enclosure with as well.
How you vent a blimped projector that is probably running a 1000 Watt bulb to keep it from overheating and melting the film is something of a wonder.
> Today, [Douglas] Trumbull is a highly regarded special effects supervisor
Love this article and its maniacal detail orientation, but man what an understatement; the late Doug Trumbull is highly regarded, in the SFX/VFX context in much the same way as Einstein was a highly regarded physicist.
Much regard heaped upon 2001's effects, including the zero-G sequences, but if you just watch the people, they are so obviously carrying their own weight and the weight of objects: the posture and movement yells 1-G at you from the screen. When the stewardess reclaims the floating pen, she's balancing her weight with each step and touching the seat backs for support, then stoops and leans. In the ship crossing to the moon, the stewardess is walking and her hips sway to her weight with each step and her feet compress. The food trays slide out of kitchen console by gravity. When the trays are delivered to the flight staff, one reach out his hand under a tray to steady it from below. When an officer visits crew in the cabin, he comes up from behind their seats, leans in to talk and rests his arms on the seatbacks. As food is sipped through clear straws, it rises and falls with G pressure. Floyd stands with his own weight in contemplation before the long instructions for the zero-G toilet. In the Discovery, spacesuits hang from the wall and the crew sit at the table to perform the antenna-module diagnostic.
The toilet instructions are a static print on plastic with a backlight. The joke about the length of the instructions is now lost to absurdity of the display.
On the moon, the excavation of the monolith is surrounded with floodlights that reveal a distinct atmospheric haze.
The camera used at the excavation site is beautifully retro. That it's used to take a group photo is quaint, especially when you consider more modern ideas like the survey "pups" deployed to map the site of the Engineers' spacecraft in the movie Prometheus.
While 2001 has been one of the most affecting movie experiences of my life— I first saw it by myself in a nearly empty large auditorium in 1972 at the age of 10 and have seen it maybe 10 more times since 2001's effects seem more prosaic with every viewing and my mind wanders into disbelief about the entire mis-en-scene. Eroding amazement is replaced by a fascination with how quickly a fantasy about an amazing future has become retro in its fashion.
The Stargate crossing seemed like one of the weaker elements in the movies heyday, but to me it's holding up better than most other design elements. The ape costumes are holding up uncannily well, as do the intro landscapes. Other elements are quirky: the mule painted like a zebra, the vastly over-complicated landing pad on the moon with the pizza-slices retractable dome, the clouds of dust swirling at the landing, and the absurdly ornate elevator than descends beneath the moon surface. Hal's memory closet with arrays of keyed optical modules that slowly eject to inconsistent extents. The oddly opaque schematics and diagnostics for the Discovey's "malfunctioning" antenna unit. The external air supply hose for the space suit. The extendable pads for the pods. The chain of blocks design for the Discovery, with the large off-axis mass of the antenna. Why is a pod needed to reach the antenna? Etc, on and on.
The ultimate movie about the future of mankind is now a beautiful relic.
With every viewing of 2001 I recall with more appreciation Andrei Tarkovsky's lament about what he might have been able to achieve with his Solaris if he had access to the kind of wealth available to Kubrick.
> With every viewing of 2001 I recall with more appreciation Andrei Tarkovsky's lament about what he might have been able to achieve with his Solaris if he had access to the kind of wealth available to Kubrick.
He might have achieved the Steven Soderbergh version. /s
As the weightlessness begins, his pen floats away - if you look really really carefully you can spot that it’s actually embedded in a thin plastic film which is rotating about an axis, given away by minute scratches on its surface.
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