Part Two of Debunking Stupidity:
‘2001’ set the standard for motion picture special effects, a standard that few films today meet. Kubrick, as we know, was a multitalented auteur; a man of many arts who could achieve nearly anything he set his mind to. The visuals of ‘2001’ were concocted by a team of new and old guard (at the time) effects artists.
Fred Ordway, a NASA consultant and Harry Lange as served as production designers. The exhortation was realism. Make it as realistic as possible. Look at the beautiful curve of the Discovery’s centrifuge, everything methodically planned to be user friendly and functional; high standards and a vision of perfection were not laughable things in the Kubrick rulebook.
Following the production designers, special effects artists Tom Howard, Kubrick himself, and Douglas Trumbull worked with a very large team to create visuals that had never been attempted before. Most of the non-practical effects were shot in camera, using a multi pass system similar to what George Lucas and company used for Star Wars almost a decade later…the defining difference being Kubrick’s insistence that they shoot all effects on the same negative. No duplication, no blue screen, no room for error. The results are astonishing, and hold up very well even today.
However, if you have had the pleasure of seeing ‘2001’ in high definition blu ray, you could observe that even these high quality shots look like what they are, models. Gorgeous-incredibly detailed, but models none the less.
So, how then could something like the Apollo films, images, and television transmissions been faked using the same technology?
All of the moon surface imagery we see in ‘2001’ is forced perspective models and top down relief maps. I have posted images showing how unnatural the lunar surface looks in the movie compared to the real surface.
http://images.astronet.ru/pubd/2000/12/19/0001162254/lunarscape_apollo17.jpg
Oblique view:
The reality of the lunar surface is that it is less abrupt and more ‘weathered’ features. No soaring rock pinnacles, no vast steep canyons, no strange monoliths calling out to Jupiter.
Why would Kubrick not use his vision of lunar desolation? Would it not call out to the hearts of men? If he truly directed the Apollo missions, why then did he not include a close encounter with ancient artifacts? Wouldn’t that have enhanced its importance and ensured even more clandestine funding?
Zero Gravity Toilet
One of the biggest contentions of hoax believers is that everything in the documented footage, including the moon walks themselves, was shot on a soundstage.
The practical effects used in the 1960s to simulate weightlessness were/are called wireworks. Basically, a system of pulleys and a counterbalance work to lift a human body off the ground and into the air. NASA used an advanced version of this for their 1/6 g training simulations:
Walter Cronkite testing the unit http://www.danamackenzie.com/moon/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/cronkite-lo-res.jpg
Very cumbersome system, I would say. I can’t imagine how you could visually deemphasize such large cables, especially when the astronauts are clearly visible from all angles:
Of course, Kubrick and crew could’ve created a whole new system that could replicate 1/6 g- but it still doesn’t explain how wires are NOT visible in any of the high res images or high quality videos.
The stuntmen doing the Frank Poole rescue scene in the movie were physically and mentally exhausted after performing their aerial acrobatics.
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/2001a/4.jpg
From the same website as the above image:
For one thing, Kubrick was determined that none of the wires supporting the actors and stunt men would show. Accordingly, he had the ceiling of the entire stage draped with black velvet, mounted the camera vertically and photographed the astronauts from below so that their own bodies would hide the wires.
“We established different positions on their bodies for a hip harness, a high-back harness and a low-back harness,” he explains, “so that no matter how they were spinning or turning on this rig – whether feet-first, headfirst or profile – they would always cover their wires and not get fouled up in them. For the sequence in which the one-man pod picks Lockwood up in its arms and crushes him, we were shooting straight up from under him. He was suspended by wires from a track in the ceiling and the camera followed him, keeping him in the same position in the frame as it tracked him into the arms of the pod. The pod was suspended from the ceiling also, hanging on its side from a tubular frame. The effect on the screen is that the pod moves horizontally into the frame to attack him, whereas he was actually moving toward the pod.”
The Numinous Cosmos 
