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.
>Was that "common knowledge" in the sci-fi community back then? That future displays would be flat, thin, rectangular?
I really don't know, and maybe I'm assuming too much, but it seems to me that guessing that displays in the future would be flat, thin, and rectangular would be merely logical extrapolation, not any great feat of insight.
Displays were already rectangular (basically) for many good reasons: we see this in both movie screens, and televisions. They played around with various aspect ratios, and found that people generally liked wide screens for movies, including extremely wide aspect ratios for "epic" movies like Lawrence of Arabia. Given the way CRTs worked, it would have been easier to have circular displays in those days, but they didn't, except for really, really old oscilloscopes. Long before CRTs, people already had photographs, and here again they were rectangular, despite camera lenses being circular. They didn't even like square photos, despite that being technically easier with circular lenses. So I think any idiot in 1960 could have guessed that displays in the future would remain rectangular. Of course, TVs at the time were not truly rectangular (they had rounded corners), but that was a technical limitation due to how CRTs worked. There was no effort to make movie theater screens look like that.
Flatness too seems pretty common-sense. Photographs and movie screens were flat. TVs weren't totally flat, but again it was a technical limitation, and they made them as flat as they reasonably could with the technology available.
Predicting thinness doesn't seem to be any feat of brilliance either: again, photographs and movie screens were very thin, obviously. Movie screens relied on rear projection, but that's a technical limitation. TVs weren't thin at all, but again this is a technical limitation, due to how CRTs worked. There were efforts to make CRT TVs thinner; I remember even reading about one attempt to have the CRT mounted sideways and somehow make the electron beam take a 90-degree turn. People didn't really want displays to be so thick. And as we saw from history in the 90s/00s, as soon as decent LCD flat-screen monitors became available, consumers quickly abandoned CRTs.
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.
