Page 157 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

The image above is from the opening sequence of Kubrick’s movie. The foreground is a stage set
where some wild pigs and some men in ape-like costumes are located. The background is an image
projected onto a Scotchlite screen. If you look carefully you can see the intersection of the stage and
the screen. It is marked with a lone below.

Looking at the sky, particularly the far left and far right, you can discern some lines and geometric
shapes which are faintly discernible. These are caused by seams and wrinkles in the Scotchlite fabric.
If the contrast and gamma of the image are altered, these background artifacts become more visible.
These are the same type of artifacts which Richard Hoagland detected in the black sky of the Apollo
lunar photos when he altered their visible properties. Jay Weidner has provided yeoman’s service
by explaining the use of the front screen projection system and illustrating its application in 2001,
A Space Odyssey as well as in the Apollo missions. Images shown here are from Weidner’s video
Kubrick’s Odyssey - Part One.

As Jay Weidner points out, the director has to hide the bottom of the projection screen by having a
raised surface on the stage in front of it. Also, by giving a contour to the foreground stage, it becomes
more difficult to detect the point where the stage and the rear screen meet. If the stage were perfectly
flat, differences in coloration between the stage and projected image would be more visible as there
would be a straight line where the two meet, and the differences would be obvious. In the images
above, you can see differences in shading and coloration between the foreground and background,
but they would be far more obvious if the back edges of the stage were straight. Following are a
couple additional examples showing where the stage ends and the Scotchlite backdrop begins. The
blue line below marks the edge of the stage.