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Comment by OGquaker | Hacker News Reader

''Kubrick found what he wanted by trying things out'' Real painfully; No object passes the limb of a planet; 10 identical film takes with his Selson motor camera track, soup one take. Good? Add one more thing (against black) 9 takes, soup one take. Good? Add another object to the shot, 8 takes, soup one take. Good? Add star field, 7 takes, soup one take. Good? Add matt box holdout and new plastic ship, 6 takes, soup one take. Good? No? Start over. All in 2.6 inch wide raw film stock, one frame per second.

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I don't know what most of that means.

In Film, the image is only recorded 50% of the time. In my 50 years of experience, no one in Hollywood knows that. Well, not no one:)

Can you provide a explain-like-im-five version of what you just said?

'Film' is used at 24 frames every second in the theater, 112 feet every minute. 99% of movies are recorded at that speed. 2001 & Star-Wars space shots were filmed one frame per second, Star-Wars assembled all the things in the scene later. 2001 did not have computer motor control, so Kubrick did everything N times for each thing in the final scene, within the camera. Planet; run by 10 times with 10 fresh rolls of film, then add stars with 9 of the SAME rolls, then foreground object (surface of Moon or hotel) 8 times, then spaceship 7 times, until all are recorded on the remaining single roll of film. No-One can look at the result until the film is developed (souped) so the only way to test for success is to develop one roll with each new added thing. Any thing wrong and you do it 10 times all again......at one inch of film per second. Thus is why the Star-Wars teaser on Christmas of 1976 had No space shots; the droids jumping ship was mica dust and were dropped from a forklift, the spinning Empire destroyer was a cut-out Polaroid taped to a plastic star field contraption.

Thanks; the "soup" is throwing me off, never heard the term.

That's interesting! Also expensive, I assume?

When your getting the thing done, So what? John Ford would just tear pages out of the script to make the bean-counters go away.

See, this guy loved this bacon, but the store ran out. So he found a wrapper and drove out to find the farmer. No one was around. Wandering, he finely came up on the farmer holding a pig up into an apple tree. "My God, how much time does that take!" "Whats time to a pig?"

50% of the time; Film records the image when stationary in the camera. Almost all movie cameras use half the time replacing the last film 'frame' with a new one: '180degrees' of the shutter cycle. Thus, if you film a Dolphin jumping, he is recorded as a broken series of blurred stills ('trails'). A 48th of a second is missing during frame replacement, a 48th of a second is recorded, but his movement smears the image. Humans see this flicker, so film projectors break each cycle into 3 flickers....

Sorry, to many words.......... Take your five year old to see the film 'Gandhi', the flicker and strobeing is unbearable.

Alamo Drafthouse has a 70mm print of 2001, and I was lucky to view it a couple of years ago. They even brought the house lights up during the intermission, just like would have been done in 1968. Keep an eye on their announcements - if they run it again, you should travel to Austin to view it.

The only time I've seen it on the big screen was from 70mm + huge plush comfy seating. One day I should go to a normal cinema and see a 35mm copy to compare :-)

Or DVD, where all the spaceship details are too blurry to make out. :(

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