Behind the scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey
I researched the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was released in 1968 and directed by Stanley Kubrick. It was originally supposed to be finished in 1966 but because of the film’s complicated production, it was sixteen months over schedule and 4.5 million over the 6 million budget. It was an especially challenging film to make because it was made so long ago there was no such thing as CGI or special effects when they were making the film so they had to cut physical pieces of film. There are more than two hundred special effect sequences. The film takes place more than thirty years in the future which was a challenge because they wanted to accurately represent technology that was far ahead of what existed. Kubrick wanted a realistic look and hired aeronautic specialists, not prop makers, to create the setting and went to IBM for drawings and blueprints for HAL. There were a lot of challenges making the film because all of the sets are very complicated and in a lot of the film they are supposed to be in places with no gravity. To achieve all of the zero gravity scenes they had to create a circular set that they could rotate while filming.
One of the actors in the movie said that in one of the shots they were sitting at a table eating and the other actor was supposed to walk to him but because it had to look like it was in zero gravity they actually rotated the entire set to the actor instead and the actor eating at the table had to pretend to eat with food glued to his fork because he was upside down. There were lots of shots of space ships and pods which they had to create models for. The ending scene had a lot of strange effects and they had no editing software so they had to use a new type of camera called a slit scan camera and they were one of the first people to use the effect in film.
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During filming, the stuntman had to do dangerous maneuvers and one stuntman who Kubrick would allow to use only one rope for safety, when more was needed, almost fell and was also not allowed to put holes in his spacesuit which almost caused him to suffocate. He was so angry he chased the director off the set. Some of the movie sets were unsafe. When the film lights were rotated upside down on their moving set, some of them exploded and caused shard of glass o fall so the film crew had to wear hard hats. Unsecured props and other equipment also fell while filming. During the leopard attack sequence, only Kubrick stayed in a leopard proof cage but no one else had any protection which made them very nervous. At one point, instead of going for the animal trainer that leopard was supposed to go after, the leopard went after a different actor instead. For the Moonscape scene, they had to dye 90 tons of sand gray. Kubrick’s assistant discovered rare trees in Africa that Kubrick had him ship back illegally which cost a lot of money and which they ended up not using and instead were recreated by the art team. Oddly, while making the film Kubrick actually tried to take out an insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London in case aliens were discovered before his film came out because it would ruin the plot of his film but it was too expensive.
Behind the scenes of John Carpenter's The Thing
I watched the making of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Before watching, I had no idea how the movie was made. I knew that CGI was not around at the time but I did not know how the special effects were created. The most complicated part of the special effects were pulling off the scenes that showed the monster. John Carpenter put a lot of focus on making sure that the monster looked believable and not like a guy in a suit.
They had to make sculptures out of jelly-like substances and silicon around animatronics and rigs that people could operate. They had to come up with something new for each scene that the monster is shown in.
The entire movie takes place in a base in the middle of the arctic. To achieve this they had to find somewhere they could film that would look like the arctic and snow enough for it to be believable. They had to build a large scale set of a military base in the summer before there was snow everywhere on the ground. Getting to the actual location was somewhat dangerous and took a lot extra effort. The cold temperatures interfered with the cameras and they had to separate cameras used indoors and outdoors because the change of temperature would fog up the lens. There was also some use of painted backgrounds used during wide shots of the area.
Another part of the special effects that was a lot harder without CGI, was all of the fire that was used in the film. For example, in the dog kennel scene, there was a fire and the characters put it out with fire extinguishers. A fire was lit using gas and the actors actually had to put it out. For safety, they constructed a set raised so that firemen could wait below it in case something went wrong. One scene actually required a trained professional to be lit on fire while wearing a fire proof suit and move around the set. It was dangerous to do because the stuntman had to hold his breath or he would hurt his lungs.
The documentary showed a lot of the preproduction of the movie including the planning of the storyboards and the preparing of the special effects and the models he used. It also focused on constructing the set and finding the right location for the movie. It was interesting to see how different it was to make a movie with out the use of CGI. Ironically, a more recent version of the film has been made using CGI but it was no where near as good as John Carpenter’s version.