This put off a lot of people, and still does. Drawing it out was the best decision Kubrick could have made. This is why he wasn’t afraid to draw out the scenes. He didn’t want to explain anything, and wanted to let a lot of the events be open to interpretation. His objective right from the beginning was to make a work of art, with pure cinema as the medium. Kubrick told Clarke he wanted to make a film about “Man’s relationship to the universe”. The major plot is from The Sentinel, a short story by Clarke. Stanley Kubrick collaborated with Arthur C. If you’re curious, the genesis of this scene is from Frankenstein, the original novel, not the film. The greatest tragedies of cinema are when no one character is better than the rest. I don’t want to spoil the film for you, but it’s one of the most poignant scenes in cinema history. My favorite set has to be from this scene, where HAL sings a song. They have different colors and geometric shapes – things you don’t notice at first glance but you’ll never forget again now that I mention it. In a spaceship like Discovery One, there are so many sets and each one is uniquely recognizable. In this scene the floor is lit, so you get an eerie under-lit feel that instantly tells you something isn’t right about the room. The lighting is motivated by the environments the characters are in. A place in which time and space can be manipulated, sort of like the Tesseract in Interstellar. There is also a scene at the end where a character grows old in, let’s just call it a virtual world. Maybe these people don’t watch enough NatGeo, or I’ve watched too much. It’s pretty obvious the apes in the beginning are humans dressed up, but I’ve seen the film with enough people who thought they were real apes. Like the light streaks and other effects in the Star Gate sequence that have been copied so many times. They were all made in camera or in the lab. The visual effects in 2001 are revolutionary. I would really love to see an 8K scan of this film in a large theater. The camera used was a Mitchell BFC 65mm, with 65mm Super Panavision Lenses. Space is grand as it is, and 2001 is the first film that showed what traveling and living in space is really like, and it terrifies you. The fluid camera work is what makes the shots awe inspiring. The camera work is the definition of pure cinema. It inspired a legion of filmmakers, and still does to this day. Movies had been made prior to 2001: A Space Odyssey with space themes, but after 2001 arrived it became obvious to many that space is an ideal template for grand stories. Pure Cinema: 2001: A Space Odyssey “Dawn of Man” Sequence The most famous being Douglas Rain, the narrator in Universe, who is also the voice of HAL. He hired a few of the people who worked on it for 2001. His intention was to make everything look real. Kubrick was heavily inspired by a short documentary called Universe (1960). Star Trek was already playing, but it never came close to this level of detail. Man hadn’t landed on the moon when this movie was being made. You have everything – a death star-like spaceship, pods, space walks, a hotel in space, a destroyer, opening the hatch to the vacuum of space, you name it. People gush a lot about the ships in Star Wars: A New Hope, but 2001: A Space Odyssey was made a decade earlier. The space ships still look great today, and hold up very well, because they were meticulously created models. Nature doesn’t make straight lines, so what seems like a dull black box speaks volumes because it’s in the right place at the right time. Then we have the monolith, appearing in certain places in the solar system put there by an unseen force. This red light has been copied several times since, but nothing comes close. The universal but simplistic design of HAL is terrifying. Christopher Nolan tried a similar idea for Inception, about 40 years later. The shot is awe inspiring even today, especially on larger screens. Kubrick used a spinning set, because that creates gravity in space, and he wanted to reproduce that. Movies made after, in the 1970s and 1980s have more outdated displays and interfaces. The displays and buttons are similar to modern design (close to 2005 if not 2001). Let’s start with production design, because it stands out in spades. What makes a film great? Technical artistry
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