The conceptual deficiencies of 2001 are somewhat redeemed by its sophisticated deployment of cinematic technology. For the first time in commercial cinema we are given the state of the art at its highest point of refinements. 2001 has become the higher ordering principle by which all commercial cinema must be measured. Douglas Trumbull, a twenty-five-year-old artist/technologist, was one of four special effects supervisors on the project. The so-called slit-scan machine, which created the Stargate Corridor sequence, was one of several pieces of equipment Trumbull developed especially for this film. Though much of its impact is due to the Cinerama format (16mm. versions are not nearly so impressive), the sequence was nevertheless a breakthrough in commercial cinema. Although this particular approach to the slit-scan was developed by Trumbull, the technique does have precedent in the work of John Whitney.
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The special effects people came up with corny things with mirrors that looked terrible. So I stumbled onto this idea through fragments of information about what John Whitney was doing with scanning slits that move across the lens creating optical warps. I figured why couldn't you have a slit that starts far away and moves toward the camera? Rather than moving laterally, why can't it move dimensionally? So I did a simple test on the Oxberry animation stand. It was rigged with a Polaroid camera so you could take Polaroid pictures of any setup immediately to see how it looked. So I just ran the camera up and down and juggled some slits and funny pieces of artwork around, and I found out that you could in fact scan an image onto an oblique surface. That whole idea expanded and I built this huge thing that occupied about 50,000 square feet. It produced the effect which I call the Slit-Scan Effect.
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| Slit-scan machine built by Douglas Trumbull for the Stargate Corridor sequence of 2001 Space Odyssey. |
Stanley Kubrick strongly emphasized to all members of the production crew that he wished the specific techniques used in the last sequence to remain as unpublicized as possible. As the black monolith vanishes into a strangely symmetrical alignment of Jupiter and its moons, the camera pans up and the "Stargate" engulfs the screen. For this infinite corridor of lights, shapes, and enormous speed and scale, I designed what I called the Slit-Scan machine. Using a technique of image scanning as used in scientific and industrial photography, this device could produce two seemingly infinite planes of exposure while holding depth-of-field from a distance of fifteen feet to one and one-half inches from the lens at an aperture of F/1.8 with exposures of approximately one minute per frame using a standard 65mm Mitchell camera. |
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| The 2001 A Space Odyssey poster with color filters in the YCM duping process. |
Trumbull's process was totally automated through an impressive battery of selsyn drives, timers, sequencers, and camera controls. Basically it involved a standard 65mm. Mitchell camera mounted on a fifteen-foot track leading to a screen with a narrow vertical slit in its center. Behind the screen was a powerful light source focused through several horizontally-shifting glass panels painted with abstract designs and colors.
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When the camera is at the "stop" position at the far end of the fifteen-foot track, the illuminated slit is framed exactly in the center of the lens. The standard shutter is taken out of phase and held wide open. An auxiliary shutter is built onto the front of the lens that opens to F 1.8 when the camera begins to track toward the screen. One single frame of film is exposed during the sixty-second period in which the camera tracks from fifteen feet to within one and one-half inches of the screen. The camera lens is attached to a bellows mount on a camshaft rotating from a selsyn linked to a drive motor, all of which maintains perfect focus and depth-of-field the entire distance of the one-minute track. When the camera reaches the screen it has veered one-half of a frame either right or left of the slit. The exposure thus produced on the single frame is a controlled blur, much the same as time exposures of freeways at night that produce streaks of red taillights. |
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| Another slit-scan Stargate Corridor clip from Stanley Kubrick's 2001. |
The shifting panels of painted glass behind the slit alter the pattern of light coming through the slit as the camera approaches, producing an uneven or streaked blur. When the process is repeated for both sides of the frame, the effect is of an infinite corridor of lights and shapes advancing at enormous velocity. The glass panes behind the slit are shifted horizontally by selsyns and advancing motors synchronized with the tracking camera. Thus the exposure pattern is identical for each frame of film except that a differential mechanism displaces the entire rig slightly for each camera run, creating an impression that the scanned image is moving.
After the Stargate, there follows a series of fantastically delicate, apparently astronomical cataclysms. The images implied exploding stars, vast galaxies, and immense clouds of interstellar dust and gas. Without revealing too much detail, I'll merely say that these effects involved the interactions of certain chemicals within a camera field of a size no larger than a pack of cigarettes. |
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| Con Pederson had worked alongside Douglas Trumbull on making films for NASA and together were hired by Stanley Kubrick to create the 2001 special effects. |
The final series of shots before Keir Dullea ends up in his unusual predicament were done by shooting some fairly unusual aerial scenes, and then juggling the color filters in the YCM duping process. It took months of experimentation to find the key to this technique. RA&A further adapted the computerised camera system (“slit-scan” effect) to create special effects for broadcast graphics and television commercials. |
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