Before astro­nauts of the Apol­lo 8 mis­sion took the Earth­rise pho­to in Decem­ber 1968, the world had nev­er seen a clear col­or image of Earth from space. That is if we dis­count the stun­ning space pho­tog­ra­phy screened months ear­li­er to the tune of the “Blue Danube” in Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film “used visu­al effects and imag­i­na­tion (both to a still-impres­sive degree),” as Col­in Mar­shall wrote here in a recent post, to make audi­ences believe that what they saw was indeed our blue mar­ble of a plan­et and oth­er col­or­ful points of inter­est in the solar system—on the way to a jour­ney into unchart­ed, psy­che­del­ic ter­ri­to­ry.

Eight years ear­li­er, film­mak­ers Roman Kroitor and Col­in Low used sim­i­lar tech­nol­o­gy, “real­is­tic ani­ma­tion,” writes the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da, that takes us “into the far regions of space, beyond the reach of the strongest tele­scope, past Moon, Sun, and Milky Way into galax­ies yet unfath­omed.”

Their short doc­u­men­tary, Uni­verse, may not be much remem­bered now—and may have been far out­shone by both real and com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed footage—but in 1961, it claimed a nom­i­na­tion at the 33rd Acad­e­my Awards for Best Doc­u­men­tary Short Sub­ject. “Upon its release in 1960,” notes Liam Lacey at The Globe and Mail, “the Nation­al Aero­nau­tics and Space Admin­is­tra­tion ordered 300 copies.”

Anoth­er of the film’s admir­ers also hap­pened to be Kubrick. Biog­ra­ph­er Vin­cent Lobrut­to describes the auteur’s first encounter with Uni­verse:

Kubrick watched the screen with rapt atten­tion while a panora­ma of the galax­ies swirled by, achiev­ing the stan­dard of dynam­ic vision­ary real­ism that he was look­ing for. These images were not flawed by the shod­dy mat­te work, obvi­ous ani­ma­tion and poor minia­tures typ­i­cal­ly found in sci­ence fic­tion films. Uni­verse proved that the cam­era could be a tele­scope to the heav­ens. As the cred­its rolled, Kubrick stud­ied the names of the magi­cians who cre­at­ed the images: Col­in Low, Sid­ney Gold­smith, and Wal­ly Gen­tle­man.

The film was in black and white, not the eye-pop­ping tech­ni­col­or of Kubrick’s mas­ter­piece, but he saw in it exact­ly what he would need when he began work on 2001. “After study­ing Uni­verse for much of 1964,” writes Kubrick schol­ar Michael Ben­son, “ear­ly in the new year Kubrick decid­ed to repli­cate the film’s tech­niques.” He tried to hire Low, who declined because of his work on “his own ambi­tious project: In the Labyrinth,” Lacey writes. He did suc­ceed in hir­ing Wal­ly Gen­tle­man, the spe­cial effects artist who brought Uni­verse’s wiz­ardry to Kubrick­’s film.

Kubrick also hired Uni­verse’s nar­ra­tor, Dou­glas Rain, the Cana­di­an actor who passed away this past Novem­ber but who will live on indef­i­nite­ly into the future as the chill­ing, affect­less voice of the HAL 9000 com­put­er, ances­tor of Siri, Alexa, and the many voic­es of GPS sys­tems every­where. Hear Rain’s cool, detached nar­ra­tion in Uni­verse, above, and see why this extra­or­di­nary film—with the Richard Strauss-like pound­ing tym­pa­ni of Eldon Rathburn’s score—would have inspired Kubrick to make what may rank as the most mes­mer­iz­ing­ly cin­e­mat­ic, dra­mat­i­cal­ly com­pelling, of sci­ence fic­tion space films to this day.

Uni­verse will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

How Stan­ley Kubrick Made His Mas­ter­pieces: An Intro­duc­tion to His Obses­sive Approach to Film­mak­ing

Stan­ley Kubrick Explains the Mys­te­ri­ous End­ing of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a New­ly Unearthed Inter­view

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

FYI: Jodie Fos­ter has just rolled out a new online course on film­mak­ing over on Mas­ter­Class. In 18 video lessons, the two-time Oscar-win­ner guides “you through every step of the film­mak­ing process, from sto­ry­board­ing to cast­ing and cam­era cov­er­age.” Accord­ing to Mas­ter­Class, the course comes with “a down­load­able work­book of les­son recaps and access to exclu­sive sup­ple­men­tal mate­ri­als from Jodie’s archive.” Stu­dents will have “the chance to upload videos to receive feed­back from peers and poten­tial­ly Jodie her­self!” You can enroll in Fos­ter’s new class (which runs $90) here. You can also pay $180 to get an annu­al pass to all of Mas­ter­Class’ cours­es–which includes oth­er film­mak­ing class­es by Ken Burns, Mar­tin Scors­ese, Spike Lee, Wern­er Her­zog and more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Teach­es His First Online Course on Film­mak­ing: Fea­tures 30 Video Lessons

Free MIT Course Teach­es You to Watch Movies Like a Crit­ic: Watch Lec­tures from The Film Expe­ri­ence

Colum­bia U. Launch­es a Free Mul­ti­me­dia Glos­sary for Study­ing Cin­e­ma & Film­mak­ing

If any­one tries to claim that mod­ern day movies have too many spe­cial effects remind them of this. Films have always used spe­cial effects to trick the audi­ence, and we’re just using new vari­a­tions of tools from a cen­tu­ry ago. In fact, right from the begin­ning, cre­ators like Georges Méliès were push­ing the bound­aries of cel­lu­loid and 24 frames per sec­ond like the show­men and magi­cians they were.

By the time we get to the silent come­di­ans as seen in our above video, tech­nol­o­gy had advanced along with the pure phys­i­cal com­e­dy of the stars. Yes, they were amaz­ing and nim­ble ath­letes, but they weren’t stu­pid. Cam­era trick­ery helped them look super­hu­man.

The first exam­ple shows Harold Lloyd’s icon­ic stunt from 1923’s Safe­ty Last!, where he hung over the streets of Los Ange­les from a clock face. Only he wasn’t real­ly. Using forced per­spec­tive, a con­struct­ed build­ing edi­fice, and a safe mat­tress a few feet below shows how Lloyd faced no dan­ger at all. Edit­ing, too, cre­ates so much of the effect, as we have seen how high the clock is com­pared to the ground in pre­vi­ous shots. The angle on the streets below and in the dis­tance real­ly sell the scene com­pared to just shoot­ing sky.

In fact, this forced per­spec­tive is still used in mod­ern films: Peter Jack­son used it a lot in The Lord of the Rings to give the impres­sion that Gan­dalf was twice as tall as Hob­bit Fro­do sim­ply by con­struct­ing the sets small­er.

And when back­grounds are basic like sand dunes, even the low bud­get film­mak­er can achieve some amaz­ing effects with no mon­ey, just a bunch of cool minia­tures:

Then again, Jack­ie Chan one-upped Lloyd for real in his 1983 film Project A, when he dan­gles from a three-sto­ry clock hand only to crash through two canopies onto the ground below. It’s a stunt so nice, they show you it twice!

The oth­er favorite trick of the silent films was mat­te paint­ing. As long as the cam­era doesn’t move, a piece of glass with a pho­to-real­is­tic paint­ing on it can seam­less­ly fit into the action.

In Char­lie Chaplin’s 1936 Mod­ern Times, that allows the come­di­an to skate very close to a three floor drop with­out even being in dan­ger. (Tech­ni­cal­ly, the cam­era *does* move in this shot, but it’s a short pan which wouldn’t affect the illu­sion.)

This old-school method has gone away, though up through the ‘80s great mat­te paint­ing artists were work­ing on films like the Star Wars tril­o­gy and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now a dig­i­tal mat­te artist works in three dimen­sions, not two, with end­less finesse and tweak­ing at their dis­pos­al, like in Game of Thrones:

The mat­te is the basis, real­ly, of all mod­ern dig­i­tal effects. Wher­ev­er there is a green screen, you’re see­ing the evo­lu­tion of the mat­te. You prob­a­bly have an app on your phone that does some­thing sim­i­lar, and can mag­i­cal­ly trans­port you to where you real­ly want to be…just like film.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts–and Keaton’s 5 Rules of Com­ic Sto­ry­telling

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

Cap­ti­vat­ing GIFs Reveal the Mag­i­cal Spe­cial Effects in Clas­sic Silent Films

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

“Though hard­ly a cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­piece,” film crit­ic Andre Soares writes, “or even a good film,” Al Jolson’s 1927 The Jazz Singer will for­ev­er bear the dis­tinc­tion of “the first time in a fea­ture film that syn­chro­nized sound and voic­es could be heard in musi­cal num­bers and talk­ing seg­ments.” What usu­al­ly goes unre­marked in film his­to­ry is that Indi­an cin­e­ma was nev­er far behind its U.S. coun­ter­part. The country’s first fea­ture sound film appeared just four years after The Jazz Singer. Now lost, the love sto­ry Alam Ara debuted in March of 1931 and ini­ti­at­ed a ven­er­a­ble tra­di­tion with its sev­er­al songs, includ­ing the first major fil­mi music hit.

The movie was so pop­u­lar, one his­to­ri­an notes, “police aid had to be sum­moned to con­trol the crowds.” Its direc­tor Ardeshir Irani was inspired by anoth­er ear­ly Hol­ly­wood part-talkie musi­cal, 1929’s Show Boat, which, like his film, used the Movi­etone sys­tem to record sound, rather than the Vita­phone sys­tem used in The Jazz Singer. Movi­etone, or Fox Movi­etone, as it came to be known after William Fox bought the patents in 1926, was also respon­si­ble for anoth­er ear­ly film devel­op­ment, the sound news­reel, a tech­nol­o­gy that made its way to India almost as soon as it debuted in the U.S.

The first sound news­reel, show­ing footage of Charles Lindbergh’s tak­ing off in the “Spir­it of St. Louis,” debuted in 1927 in New York. In Novem­ber 1929, Fox opened the first exclu­sive news­reel the­ater on Broad­way, and in Jan­u­ary of that same year, a Movi­etone cam­era cap­tured the street scenes of Bom­bay (now Mum­bai) that you see above, over 13 min­utes of footage com­plete with live audio record­ing of bustling crowds, busy ven­dors and laun­dry work­ers, honk­ing auto­mo­biles, and clip-clop­ping hors­es.

This incred­i­ble doc­u­ment pre­serves the sights and sounds of a sig­nif­i­cant Indi­an slice of life from 90 years ago, and shows how ear­ly the tech­nol­o­gy for mak­ing sound films arrived on the sub­con­ti­nent. When Ardeshir Irani began film­ing his ground­break­ing musi­cal the fol­low­ing year, he would use exact­ly this same tech­nol­o­gy, shoot­ing all of the dia­logue and music live, on a closed set late at night to avoid unwant­ed noise like the street sounds you hear above.

Learn more of the Fox Movi­etone news­reel sto­ry here, and here, learn how Indi­an cin­e­ma began in Mum­bai in 1899 when Indi­an pho­tog­ra­phers, writ­ers, the­ater impre­sar­ios, and entre­pre­neurs like Irani took the new tech­nol­o­gy and used it to build a cul­tur­al empire of their own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

India on Film, 1899–1947: An Archive of 90 His­toric Films Now Online

100 Years of Cin­e­ma: New Doc­u­men­tary Series Explores the His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma by Ana­lyz­ing One Film Per Year, Start­ing in 1915

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 His­tor­i­cal Films on YouTube

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness