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Post by nomuse on Jan 1, 2012 19:43:17 GMT -4
Yah. Devil in the details. I've never found a clear way to express it, but I've noticed over and over again a certain hierarchy of observational skills.
You've got the Apollo Denier, who believes they have a better eye for detail than most people -- allowing them to notice "flaws" and "anomalies" that few other people have seen. So for them, they are ranked at the most accurate and detailed observations, with both supporters of the official story and the great unwashed public below them in skill.
These are the folks who constantly go on about "This looks exactly like..." -- two mountains that are similar, two photographs that are similar, a lens flare that looks sort of like a light fixture, a torn scrap of kapton that looks like an 8 x 10 glossy, a bit of movement that looks like what they think theatrical flying looks like.
The problem is, that in true Dunning-Kruger fashion, their observational skill is actually well below average. Or, to be more fair, whatever skill they have in actually seeing what is on the print is overshadowed by rampant pareidolia and an urgency to make the worst possible inferences (aka studio lights, wires, etc.)
It leads to a rather odd form of talking past, when you try to debate one of these over what they think they are seeing. As you attempt to point out how the surface resemblance fails when a closer look is taken (for instance, a direct overlay of the mountains in question, or a blink comparison of the "identical" photographs) the Apollo Denier remains stuck in the first iteration.
To them, it is inconceivable that you saw what they saw then moved on beyond it. To them, the only possibility is that you simply aren't sharp enough to make the first observation; that your observational skills are too dull (or too dulled by your emotional need to support the Official Story) to see the "identical" mountain or the "flying on a wire" the Apollo Denier is pointing out.
(It isn't just raw skill...there is more here than solving the Sunday Supplement "One of these drawings is different" puzzle. Understanding why the lens flare is not a light requires real world skills beyond knowing that people filming movies often use lights. It involves knowing, for instance, that such fixtures have specific shapes and a pentagonal frame is not one of them. And being familiar with the look of artifacts of internal reflection in a camera, their various sources, their shapes, their geometric relationships, etc.)
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Post by nomuse on Dec 27, 2011 19:03:01 GMT -4
To be nice, it would appear to him as an unwinnable challenge. No matter how good his produced images were, someone could still say "It just doesn't look right to me." Of course, this board is pretty good about not accepting unsubstantiated opinion, even from our own. We'd almost certainly be able to point at exactly what in his images we didn't agree with, and explain why in detail.
And on the gripping hand, there is a solution to that; present a folder of random images from the actual missions, with a couple of fakes inserted, and the challenge would be to spot the fakes.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 23, 2011 5:01:21 GMT -4
What was funniest to me is that for Episode 1, Jar-Jar was actually my favorite character. Probably because he was rendered after the CGI environments, he was the only character who actually seemed to look around and otherwise take an interest in where he was.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 22, 2011 22:03:11 GMT -4
Raster graphics didn't catch on until about 1971. I was thinking of saying in an earlier post that if NASA had used the vector graphics of the late 60's, the LM would have looked like one of the ships from Space War. Or, as we thought of it when a heavily modified version hit the arcades, Asteroids.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 22, 2011 17:49:29 GMT -4
I'd call it "flattened perspective."
To me, forced perspective is when scenery is built with non-square walls that make it look larger than it is.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 22, 2011 17:41:25 GMT -4
It wasn't just the CGI, it was the fact that acting to nothing is hard. 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' did an amazing job and there was still moments that said "they ain't looking at nothing." I thought the secret is just to have something -- a prop, a piece of equipment -- take the place of the cartoon character so the actor can focus his eyes on it. E.g., during the weasels' raid of his apartment when Eddie Valiant hides Roger in the kitchen sink, Bob Hoskins is actually holding a pipe that sprayed the water that we see coming from Roger's mouth in the finished film. Even in ordinary face-to-face conversation, actors often do their lines with stand-ins. The original Star Trek might film Kirk from Spock's point of view, and then Spock from Kirk's point of view, each delivering his lines to an assistant standing next to the camera who read the other character's lines. If the director didn't have them in the shot together there was no need for both actors at the same time. One of those moments is preserved in the Star Trek blooper reels. The scene involves Kirk and Spock working on a communicator, trying to tune it to get through to the ship. "I think...I've got it," says Kirk. "Kirk to Enterprise. Enterprise, come in." "Enterprise. Lieutenant Uhura here," comes a VERY male voice (presumably a production assistant.) Beat. Then Shatner and Nimoy break up laughing. The story I heard (and it could easily be false) is that Lucas made no effort in the prequels to explain to the actors what they were seeing, or even provide eye lines. It would certainly explain why Annakin in particular is wandering around Coruscant looking bored out of his head.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 21, 2011 20:31:37 GMT -4
I forget the name of the camera technique for a moment but Hitch popularized it in the signature shot of his "Vertigo." It is also used (usually more subtly) in other feature films and even in some television dramas.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 21, 2011 17:06:02 GMT -4
It's also instructive how many times a critic will say "That CGI looked really fake" in reference to a movie scene that included no CGI whatsoever. Or how many times they will miss the small but effective trickery that happens all the time in scenes that aren't rampaging dinosaurs or crashing spaceships. Such as mat extensions, or the digital removal of television aerials from rooftops in a period shot, and so on.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 21, 2011 16:11:11 GMT -4
Re Hawaii -- for the Apollo Deniers, it is sufficient that it looks 75% like some part of the Moon, or that by using it as a background they can explain 75% of a single picture. The remaining details are simply waved away, regardless of whether they are the kind of details that can be waved away (like shrubbery) or that are extremely difficult (like kicking up dust in a non-vacuum).
Speaking of shrubbery, there's an amusing account on the DVD of what they had to go through to make the lifeless desert setting of the Doctor Who episode "Planet of the Dead." Many, many days of a large team of laborers pulling plants all the way out to the camera horizon. Then sweeping, which had to be repeated at regular intervals. And the cast and crew were all kept behind barriers so they wouldn't disturb the sand. And they started this process in the middle of an already extremely stark-looking desert in Dubai.
One of the many problems I have in considering more than one photograph being faked on the Moon is that between shots, you'd have to somehow clean up after the crew yet manage to get every footstep and every pebble back into the right position.
But then, the hoax believers only consider the pictures in isolation. To them, it is perfectly plausible that one iconic image was constructed in the darkroom from multiple layers. They completely ignore the pictures immediately following and preceding on the roll, which show the same subjects but from such a wide variety of angles as to make it simple to reconstruct the three dimensional geometry of the scene.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 19, 2011 19:10:01 GMT -4
Many people have attacked Ponrovsky's work. But they haven't been different attempts to take it apart; they have all been in agreement about the underlying facts and how Ponrovsky got it wrong.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 19, 2011 18:52:12 GMT -4
Yah..I'm guilty of that. I use "you are an idiot" as shorthand for "you need to study." I don't believe I've met many actual idiots, in the medical sense. I believe everyone is capable of learning the material if they apply themselves. So what I react to is more of a "you are determined to remain ignorant, aren't you" among the common Apollo Deniers. But I should probably stop using "idiot" as shorthand.
It is hard. There's a very unclear line between "That was a stupid thing you said" and "You were stupid to say that thing." And since tone is notoriously hard to read in text...
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Post by nomuse on Dec 19, 2011 17:00:31 GMT -4
But it isn't just tone.
If you get the science wrong, you got the science wrong. There is no way to soften that. "Well, you have a point," is not usable if, in fact, the person's facts are wrong. "Many people think that," might be a possible ease-in but it opens the door to facts being fluid affairs that bow to majority opinion.
What is worse is that so often what the Apollo Denier of the day brings forward is not a simple error of fact. Very few come out with "The pressure of Earth's atmosphere at sea level is 512 lb per square inch." No; they come in with such gems as "What is our atmosphere made of, that it keeps your so-called 'vacuum' out?"
You can't just politely provide the facts there. Saying "Mostly nitrogen and oxygen by weight" is an answer to the question as stated but it doesn't address the underlying misconceptions. You are left either having to give a basic lecture on what pressure is, or say "You need to study -- here's some links to some basic science texts or a good introductory Wikipedia page."
There is no way, in short, of politely saying "You don't know enough about the subject to discuss it in a rational manner."
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Post by nomuse on Dec 18, 2011 22:37:47 GMT -4
Ah, but sometimes the seeming stupidity is due to a "whistleblower." And don't look at the men behind that particular curtain; the boss and political officer who were too dumb to notice the big Clue the whistleblower put in, or all the general public and neutral observers who didn't notice the clue either (maybe it is like a fnord for conspiracy believers; only they can see it?) And of course the whistleblower him or herself, who apparently never saw a thriller or spy movie and hasn't managed to think of an anonymous letter or a self-addressed package or tapes in a safe deposit vault or any of the other usual tricks.
It strikes me that this construct of the Apollo Deniers, this "whistleblower" who doesn't blow any actual whistles, is comrade in arms with those other fictional constructs; the serial killer who leaves elaborate clues in the form of word games, or the pirate who hides a treasure and leaves a map bristling with literary allusions and primitive cryptography.
Its all so the average Joe -- the one who every now and then solves the Scramble in their daily paper -- can think that this occasional competence in mundane trivia could actually, in the right circumstance, allow them to outwit the baddies, get the girl, and save the world.
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Post by nomuse on Dec 18, 2011 16:33:15 GMT -4
I think what's really ticking me off is Tchaikovsky's seeming claim that all of the Apollo imagery could be faked on the computer by this simple method he feels obligated to explain to those who didn't think of it.
This requires one of two things, both equally insulting:
It requires either that the Apollo images shown to the world (and collected by many of us at the time) were laughably bad, the sort of thing that would in other circumstances have the silhouettes of two robots and a guy in a jumpsuit appearing in front of them. And somehow nobody ever noticed this.
Or, it requires that the entire computer arts industry, including games and Hollywood, are filled with morons who hadn't realized they could improve the state of the art of 3d with a few simple tricks.
(Yes, I know. I'm striking Nutcracker this eve, okay?)
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Post by nomuse on Dec 17, 2011 21:32:58 GMT -4
Oh, and there's another thing 3d doesn't do well. Halos. The interaction of light with a surface that causes that lovely rim lighting effect in the real world doesn't happen in most render engines. Nor does 3d look like film, of course -- add more render time and sophisticated software to film-ize it. (Yeah, I know, there's a technical term for it but I'm between shows and pushed for time).
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