Factual Scientific errors in movies...

Cafe Society
141

I was referring to 2010, where Discovery is seen rotating in huge circles.

There is no reason to believe that only that small portion of the ship would have had gravity. Either you can create it artificially or you cannot. The shoes were neither velcro nor magnetic. They were simply cloth padded slippers.

The effect of the stewardess ( s.i.c. ) walking upside down with a tray of hot food was achieved in a simple yet brilliant manner. ( Nod to both Stanley Kubrick and Geoffrey Unsworth, BSC. ). Let’s see if I can condense the detailed description in “The Making of Kubrick’s 2001”.

Imagine a ferris wheel. Now imagine three ferris wheels. They are not mounted with a center pin. They lay in huge rollers, that turn them. They are set RIGHT against each other.

The camera is mounted exactly in the middle of FW 1.

The woman walks down the hallway of FW1, towards FW2. We are not aware that there is anything amiss. She slowly turns, and “steps onto the turning area”.

The woman then slowly walks her way in an anti-gravity illusion and disappears upside down.

FW3 is the back wall.

Here’s how they did it. The camera was mounted exactly at center of FW1. It was linked physically to FW3. When FW 1 and 3 are rotated on huge rollers, they move as one element. FW2 is in fact a standing set piece. It looks like the same hallway, but is not connected in any way to FW 1 and 3.

FW1 and 3 rotate as one. The visual effect is that the hallway and back wall is NOT moving at all. The small area where she turned and walked with the tray was, in fact, the only part of the set that did NOT rotate. She turned, walked a path normally. The foreground corridor AND background back wall moved in synch. She did not rotate.

Net effect? She appeared to rotate. We accept what we want to see. The corridor is a normal one. Therefore, she must have really walked her way upside down.

The stills of the set built just for this effect are stunning to see. Here is a good view of it in its entirety. Anti Grav Stewardess.

A nifty in-camera effect, not aided in ANY way by opticals. Best part? If you watch it, and watch very carefully just as she steps and turns, there is no discernable jolt or jarring of the camera as the huge machine begins to turn both Ferris Wheels 1 and 3. It simply starts to rotate.

The film was shot in a very wide aspect ratio ( at least 2.20:1, if not wider ). This would make any horizonal shuddering even more obvious.

Cartooniverse

142

Full-ship rotation was not normal behavior. I seem to recall that the ship was rotating because the centrifuge had seized up over the years it was abandoned in Jovian orbit. The first thing the crew of the Leonov did on reaching Jupiter was stop the Discovery’s rotation and re-start the centrifuge.

Oh, and Cal? I suppose that means that we both win the argument. Now let’s figure out why they were drinking a liquor called “Ambrosia” on BG, when ambrosia was the food of the classical gods and nectar was their drink…

143

Ummm… derned if I know – I never watched past the first coupla episodes.
I do like the way they used that Cylon bouncing-back-and-forth red eye on the Vanna White robot on the recent Jimmy Neutron TV movie, though.

(Cylon 1: “Why-is-it-we-never-hit-any-Battlestar-ships?”
Cylon 2: “How-can-we-do-any-better-with-one-eye-that-bounces-back-and-forth-like-a-ping-pong-ball?”

– MAD magazine satire “Cattlecar Galaxica”)

144

In Starship troopers, how do insects (even giant ones) throw rocks into space?

Are they (gulp) using really powerful farts ? :eek:

145

As Kilt-wearin’ man has explained, full-ship rotation of Discovery was abnormal. In both of the books 2001 and 2010, Arthur C Clarke took the time to explain the centrifuge system of the Discovery. He makes it clear that only a portion of the ship rotated, not the entire ship itself. He also explains why the ship was rotating end over end in 2010. Basically the reasons previously given in the thread.

Cloth padded slippers would have not stopped the stewardess from floating off the floor. The film even focuses on the slippers, making it clear that they were interacting with the floor in some manner. The book again describes the mechanism, although stops short of calling it VELCRO.

146

Um, Cartooniverse, I think you’re confused about the stewardess set. The part that the stewardess was walking on had to be rotating, because she was walking. It was basically a giant hamster wheel. And the rest of the set and the camera were all fixed to the hamster wheel and rotating with it. The woman herself is the only thing that’s not rotating.

And on the Discovery, they were able to make artificial gravity, but only on those parts of the ship that were rotating (this is absolutely correct, by the way, and applaudable. We’ll probably never have “artificial gravity” of the flip-a-switch-anywhere type so popular in SF). There are probably other logistical reasons to not rotate the whole ship (you want to keep the engines pointing the same way, for instance), and you don’t need artificial gravity on the whole ship, anyway, just enough that the astronauts can get some excercise. I don’t recall the scenes of them walking outside of the centrifuge, but if they were doing so without magnetic boots or the equivalent, that was an error. But it’s a very understandable error, because there wasn’t any really good way of doing zero-g at the time.

147

Poole’s spacewalk was done as a zero-g jaunt using a pod to reach the AE-35 antenna on the ship’s spine - a good distance from the centrifuge. He was weightless while replacing the antenna unit. Later, when he is attacked by the pod (HAL was in control of the pod) and hurled into space with a disconnected air hose, the zero-g effects are superb - as is the total silence the events take place in. Finally, Bowman attempts to retrieve Poole using the second pod and discovers that his partner is dead, and allows the body to continue its journey to Jupiter. On returning, Bowman has the helmetless zero-g adventure previously debated, which also happens in zero-g. Once he enters the ship, I’m pretty sure his boots are demonstrated to be magnetic because I seem to recall heavy metallic footsteps and a stilted walking motion…but it’s been a couple of years since I’ve watched it. Once Bowman reaches the computer core, he is weightless while pulling HAL’s memory chips.

Lots of wire work and camera tricks (the computer core scenes involved a camera shooting down from above, and Keir Dullea sitting what for all the world looked like a hydraulic lift…) but some really excellent zero-g illusions that really have yet to be topped.

Of course, in 2010, the whole cast has a scene where they stand around in the Discovery’s pod bay, so someone screwed up…

148

Oh, I almost forgot - there was a scene of spacewalkers walking on the outside of the Discovery’s spherical crew section - in 2010, the first two spacewalkers have to walk from the center of rotation (if I recall, it was the area of the ship’s spine where the antenna was) to the pod bay in order to force their way in thru the pod bay doors. Their placement implied that centrifugal force was keeping them on the hull. It seemed to me a fairly well done scene in a fairly flawed sequel movie.

149

For that matter, if someone gets shot in the chest with a phaser, how come THEY disintegrate? Why not just their shirt. If it gets them, too, how come there isn’t a pit in the floor where their feet were touching it?

-Joe, annoyed by lack of internal consistency

150

Sorry, Chronos. I love ya babe, but you are wrong. She pantomimed walking when in fact all she did was tread in place. The closer corridor, and correspondingly locked- in third ferris wheel moved in perfect synch “around” her.

Watch the sequence again. Look at her feet. She’s faking the walking. She did not rotate in any way shape or form. The foreground and background elements turned. Her miming walking makes it look as though she’s using Velcro slippers, hence the seed of that urban legend.

In addition to Jerome Agee’s great book, I shot a film in NYC for a British crew that came over for a week to do NYC locations. The Director of Photography was in fact Michael Wilson- one of the camera operators on the movie and a friend of Unsworth’s. ( NOT the camera operator who broke his back in a fall in the H.A.L. Mainframe set sequence near the end, when the computer is slowly disabled as it sings " Daisy, Daisy" )

151

Hmph. You “corrected” me when in fact we are in agreement. Read my post again, Chronos. I attempted to articulate the fact that Ferris Wheel’s 1 and 3 were linked, but she stood on Ferris Wheel 2, which never moved. Since the camera was chained down ( as well as the Operatorr ) to FW 1, and it moved perfectly with FW 3, the “world” established by that point of view would not have moved at all, but she stood separated in FW2, and faked walking. The world turned around her.

That’s what I meant to say, you may have misread it but that was my intention in the first description- and seems to be what you said as well. -spits in palm- friends? :smiley:

152

Well, we’re still in disagreement about the circle itself where she was walking (or not walking), but since I don’t have a copy of the movie readily available for re-watching, I’ll take your word on that for now. Although I am puzzled about how one could walk in place on a moving (relative to the rest of the set) platform, and make that look like walking on a still (relative to the rest of the set) platform.

In any event, I’ll shake on it.

153

Ferris wheels aside, a another set of points doesn’t seem to add up.

The outer view of the moon/hemisphere shuttle shows our passenger “vertical” (let’s say) looking out the window. The pilots are at the apex, sitting “on their backs” looking straight up/out. Correct?

The strewardess makes her rotation and walks off camera. She’s upside down now. So she would still not be aligned with the pilots orientation when she delivered food.

The flight deck (from the pilots POV) shows the stewardess poking herself into the flight deck. She could have been “horizontal” (to the flight deck) and just handing up/out food, but then I would think her not rotating would have put her in a better orientation. Anyway, it never seemed to make sense.


+-+  pilots
  |
  +--O

   stewardess
  after  before
     +-     O
     |      |         O
     |-     |-        |    passenger
     |      |         +-+
     O      +-          |

Another point - the moon/hemisphere shuttle approaches the moon and we see out of the pilots viewports. But their orientation should make it impossible to look out and see the surface as they are approaching since they are “on their backs”.

Even if I’ve totally messed this up and the stewardess was on the “space plane” then she wouldn’t need to turn upside down to go deliver food to the pilots. I haven’t seen 2001 in “centaurs”, so please correct me and help me out here.

154

Wouldn’t two be enough if you also knew the time between them?

155

[QUOTE=Chronos]
Although I am puzzled about how one could walk in place on a moving (relative to the rest of the set) platform, and make that look like walking on a still (relative to the rest of the set) platform.

[QUOTE]

Okay. Got Jerome Agee’s book in front of me, and I just watched the sequence on the DVD. Honest. She comes into the tunnel, moves frame right, takes a food tray and adds something to the top one ( she carries two of them ). She turns and moves into the middle FW. She turns slowly, faking the slightly unstable steps she’s used in every shot she’s in. She turns to face frame right, and starts to walk. She slowly rotates 180 degrees counterclockwise, and then steps through a “doorway” we cannot see.

The foreground and background sets are locked. The set piece she steps into just as she turns to face frame right is not locked. It does not move. The foreground set that the camera is mounted on moves clockwise, locked to the background cool door.

I don’t know how else to describe this. If you watch the sequence ( and I did, twice just now ), you see that she steps up and down slowly. She’s walking in place, faking it till Kubrick tells her to walk through the unseen doorway. To our eye- which has been rotating clockwise the whole time- she has walked upside down.

–pant pant-- I swear to ya.

156

Yes, certainly the stewardess’ performance is impressive, and I guess I can buy her pulling off the walking-in-place bit. It can’t be much harder than the convincing job she did of weightless-walking. I’m willing to put this discussion on hiatus until/unless I re-watch the scene, and until then, provisionally consider you correct.

No. An orbit has six parameters: One for the size of the orbit, one for the shape (eccentricity) of the orbit, three for the orientation of the orbit, and one for where in the orbit the object is at some reference time. A visual observation can generally only give you two pieces of information: The right ascension of the object at the time of observation, and the declination at the time of observation (in other words, where it appears to be in the sky). Since we need to determine six numbers, we need to start with at least six numbers, which means at least three simple visual observations. If you also have some way of measuring the distance to the object, or its radial velocity, then you can get away with fewer observations. And without knowing when each observation occured, I don’t think that any number of observations would be adequate. Of course, one can make estimates and reasonable guesses about some parameters, and approximate an orbit based on a smaller set of observations, but there’s no way this sort of SWAGging would be adequate to determine that the object would hit the Earth.

157

I can buy her walking in place. It’s an early version of the moonwalk!

158

Just for fun, I’ll respond to the OP instead of joining in on the extended hijack.

In the crappy movie Phantoms, based on hack writer Dean Koontz’s stupid novel of the same name, it’s flatly stated (by a woman who’s supposed to be a scientist) that a human brain weighs six pounds. This mistake was carried from Koontz’s witless, hackneyed book, through the entire movie production process, without ever being corrected by somebody who had received the benefit of an 8th grade science education.

159

So how much does a human brain weigh?

160

The average adult brain weighs between 2.9 and 3.1 lbs.