The Smoking Gun of Bart's "Smoking Gun" Footage

[PhantomWolf]

Yeah, I do have to keep reminding myself that this was pre-Apollo, but at the same time a few rocks and things on the surface would have given it a bit of texture and broken up the stage floor look a bit. In the end, anyone that could compare the Lunar scenes to the Apollo footage and say that the Apollo footage is hollywood really needs their eyes checked, and possibly their brains too.

[Mr Gorsky]

countzero said:

Dust: The dust billows extremely noticeably when the moonbus and shuttle rocket land.

Probably unavoidable, short of using no dust at all .

Oh, come on. Everyone knows that they could have just used washed and sifted sand to solve that problem, but they didn't because that would have exposed the lunar landing hoax, which Kubrick also directed.

[Count Zero]

ToSeeked (in the fine print).

[AtomicDog]

Funny how Rocky insists that NASA used a technique (washed and sifted sand) that was never used before and has not been used since in the history of cinematography.

[nomuse]

Thinking about this, and this has to come out of that basic attitude seemingly held by most CT's that the professional and the educated aren't any smarter than the average Joe; they are just better at parroting a particular party line.

In the real world, a hundred-odd years of a bunch of very smart and driven people figuring out what could be done in a motion picture: each building upon the discoveries of the past. In the CT world, Hollywood et al is filled with wage slaves who are content to pick up a paycheck and have no particular interest in understanding how a film is made -- or of finding ways to make a better one.

So "of course" a handful of engineers from NASA could come up with stuff that's decades ahead of Hollywood. You see, the NASA fakers have their kickback money to motivate them. Unlike, say, Francis Ford Coppola or Douglas Trumbull, who only have a measly salary...

[reynoldbot]

When it comes to the billowing dust in 2001, Kubrick knew it was unrealistic and used it anyway for dramatic effect. Even though it looks wrong to us, to many people it looks right and without it people might have thought it looked fake.

People are quick to point out the inconsistencies in 2001, but you have to remember that A: it was filmed before the actual landings, B: no popular film has ever come close to matching the realism, and C: without cgi to solve problems, Kubrick was forced to either leave inconsistencies in the film or as he did in many cases find a way to get pretty close. The pen may not be floating on its axis in the shuttle scene but it looks damn impressive anyway. You guys are too hard on him. 2001 is a movie, not a documentary. The primary concern is the storyline, not the perfect interpretation of subtle aspects of the lunar environment or gravity. I think he did a fantastic job.

[AtomicDog]

I think that you are misunderstanding our comments. I, for one, am saying that if the greatest special effects team in the world couldn't fake spaceflight and lunar activities, then no one could.

[nomuse]

Well, I agree in principle, but I disagree with some of the argument.

I hear variations of the "the audience doesn't know any better" as excuse for doing bad historical research, bad science, sloppy special effects, and a variety of other ills. Now, sure, there are real reasons to commit these errors; time and money, dramatic needs, and convincing the audience (to paraphrase Mark Twain severely, reality can get away with stuff fiction can't.)

So it's a good argument that doing 1/6 G in the monolith scene would be too costly and troublesome and doesn't advance the story. It's also a good argument that, sigh, sound in space works for most films. Kubrick happened to have a film that worked without it. And it is a more subtle but still correct point that certain counter-intuitive things are best left off the screen. Sure, they did have remote-controled robot bombs in WWI, but put one on the screen without explanation and the audience will get distracted in wondering if it is really period or if the filmmakers messed up.

What isn't a good argument is "the audience doesn't know so they don't care." Using the example of the synthesized bass line; for a traditional jazz number the listener might not know anything of what the jazz bass is capable of, but if you fake it your both risk tickling at their subconscious that something "just isn't right," and you also cut yourself away from the additional nuancing you can give to the piece through a properly expressive and idiomatic line.

The shuttle scene is in large part about the joys of being in zero-g...about commercial space flight, about being able to hop a rocket to the moon and get served hot coffee (in a tube) by a pretty flight attendant while you are at it. So if Kubrick could have filmed in zero G, it would have been a better scene.

Film is not about showing pictures of what something might look like. It's about drawing the viewer in and making them feel the incidents and surroundings. I'd like to feel what it would be like to take that flight, and the nuances of actual zero-G is part of that picture (whether I can intellectually describe how a pen is supposed to float, or not).

[donnieb]

By the time Apollo 13 was made, it was possible to film in low- or zero-g... if your scene was fairly short and your set could fit on the Vomit Comet.

I wonder if Kubrick considered this option. It may have been impossible to get private access to such airplanes at the time, or prohibitively expensive. Or maybe he didn't want to be constrained to such a small space (even though it would have worked in some scenes I can think of).

[alex04]

- i love the title of this thread, it just smacks of cheek, lol. -given that the term 'smoking gun' is bandied about all the CT forums in usually a quite pompous manner ;D

[Ginnie]

I'm sure Rocky is still viewing so:

If all the soil was filtered of dust, how come on Apollo 14 the Mobile Equipment Transporter, also known as the 'lunar rickshaw' used to get bogged down so much in the lunar dust that the astronauts were more often dragging or carrying the M.E.T. rather than rolling it?

[emcsq]

Very good; but whereabouts do we see a Hasselblad camera poked out of the CSM un-blacked out earth-view window during the TV Xmission of the same image?

Think about it.

[Bob B.]

What?

[LunarOrbit]

emcsq,

Please respond to the private message I sent you regarding multiple user accounts. If you don't tell me which account you want to keep I will disable both of them.

[PhantomWolf]

emcsq said:

Very good; but whereabouts do we see a Hasselblad camera poked out of the CSM un-blacked out earth-view window during the TV Xmission of the same image?

Think about it.

bob said:

What?

I think he is trying to suggest that since we didn't see the hasselblad camera in front of the TV camera that the images both can't have been taken "at the same time." Of course this misses the point since while there was some rotation during the video, a image taken using the Hasselblad either shortly before, or after, the TV transmission would be close enough to the earth shown during the transmissions for a comparison to be made.