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.
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?
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.
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
> 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
You will probably appreciate this site and especially this post, which is an exploration of the typography of the series.
> “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>In the Discovery, spacesuits hang from the wall and the crew sit at the table to perform the antenna-module diagnostic.
The spacesuits might have been secured at both ends to keep them from getting bunched up and make them easier for crew to get into.
In the diagnostic scene, there was supposed to be 1g there: that was in the rotating section of Discovery where they had spin gravity.
>she's balancing her weight with each step and touching the seat backs for support
Of course it's hard to get actors standing on Earth to act like they're in a zero-g environment, but in the story, the crew had Velcro shoes, so they were supposed to be acting like this. Touching seat backs in zero-g probably makes sense too, to stabilize yourself when you're just floating (with only your Velcro shoes holding you to anything).
>As food is sipped through clear straws, it rises and falls with G pressure.
Food rising in a straw happens because of atmospheric pressure: the person sucking creates a vacuum, and air pressure inside the container pushes the food out. Food falling in a straw is from gravity, but could also be explained by the person intentionally blowing, to prevent spillage.
> 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
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.
1) https://www.youtube.com/@TheHALProject
I think folks behind this did a great job imitating HAL and other computer screens seen in the film. Wish it would be a part of XScreenSaver project.
There's an item in the FAQ at jwz.org/xscreensaver that explains how to use a video as a source.
These are really quite cool and well done, thanks for sharing
What's interesting is that Kubrick, famous for 100 takes to get everything right, didn't spot this, or if he did was unable/unwilling to fix it.
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?
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.
Exaggerations and rumors. See my other post on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40006453
Evidence he was more doing that to project an image (no pun intended) than anything.
Love this. The adhd spirit is inspiring.
Right at the end of the article: "There is also an extra colon mark in the line just below." pretty sure that's a semicolon!
reminds me of this: https://stanleykubrick.neocities.org/barrylyndoncandles
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
> 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
You will probably appreciate this site and especially this post, which is an exploration of the typography of the series.
https://fontsinuse.com/uses/28760/neon-genesis-evangelion
Previously on HN [2019] 415 points 111 comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21323736
Choice quote from that prior submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21328512
> “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
> Brian Eno
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/649039-whatever-you-now-fin...
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.
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
Given the film-noir vibe and recycled-future look, CRT's might have been an intentional artistic choice.
Yes and be didn't just predict space travel and display tech but also AI.
Arthur C Clarke collaborated closely with Kubrick on developing the story.
Oh yeah true I forgot it was just based on a book.
The book and movie were done at the same time. Clarke wrote multiple versions of it - see "The Lost Worlds of 2001".
The concept is from a short story "The Sentinel" by Clarke.
This is also true for the large NORAD screens in WarGames (1983).
> none of these were actual computer output
Not surprising since real-time, high-def color CGI hadn't yet been done in 1968.
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.
Nope, just random ramble on and on. But some interesting tidbits about the filming of the movie itself in the second part.
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.
Douglas Trumbull was the technician behind the special effects. He had been working making films for NASA describing future space missions.
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.
Also used many years later to spectacular effect in War Games (1984).
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.
Is this article out-of-date?
There is a (wonderful) 2001 4k uhd disk that has come out that is unmentioned.
EDIT: December, 2018
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KH8W76F
Fascinating that this film continues to draw attention.
Watching it again recently in BluRay I noticed that the Moonbus cockpit has nixie tubes near the joysticks. (Must have been an older model.)
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.
https://archive.ph/8lxPO
What are "scratches"? For the film illiterate.
I wonder if they are on the CED version.
> 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.
It's really too bad his Magicam system on "The Starlost" didn't pan out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starlost#Development_and_p...
A Space Xyzzy
SPOILER ALERT WHAT'S SEEN CANNOT BE UNSEEN
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.
>In the Discovery, spacesuits hang from the wall and the crew sit at the table to perform the antenna-module diagnostic.
The spacesuits might have been secured at both ends to keep them from getting bunched up and make them easier for crew to get into.
In the diagnostic scene, there was supposed to be 1g there: that was in the rotating section of Discovery where they had spin gravity.
>she's balancing her weight with each step and touching the seat backs for support
Of course it's hard to get actors standing on Earth to act like they're in a zero-g environment, but in the story, the crew had Velcro shoes, so they were supposed to be acting like this. Touching seat backs in zero-g probably makes sense too, to stabilize yourself when you're just floating (with only your Velcro shoes holding you to anything).
>As food is sipped through clear straws, it rises and falls with G pressure.
Food rising in a straw happens because of atmospheric pressure: the person sucking creates a vacuum, and air pressure inside the container pushes the food out. Food falling in a straw is from gravity, but could also be explained by the person intentionally blowing, to prevent spillage.
> 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
I commend the effort, though I'm not sure if I'm commending the author or their Adderal prescription