slitscan revealed
The copy of Cinefex (Issue 85, April 2001) which I ordered recently from America has arrived. I bought it in the hope that its long article on ‘2001: A Space Odessey‘ would contain a thorough description of how Douglas Trumbull created the Star Gate sequences, since the limited amount I could find on the Internet wasn’t detailed enough. And now I know why.
The fascinating article discusses many aspects of the filming and describes some of the slitscan techniques at length (pp110-113), but it’s hard to grasp exactly how it was done. I suspect that I’ll have to watch the film and re-read the article repeatedly before I could work out to do something similar. Still, it prompted me to relook at the pioneering abstract animation by John Whitney, such as Catalog (1961) and Arabesque (1975), and following those links reintroduced me to Karl Sims, whose low-tech three-pendulum rotary harmonograph looks like a fruitful source for converting to Processing sketches.
Perhaps the appeal of these pioneers is that the special effects in films like ‘Inception‘ are beyond the scale of a small group of dedicated people working on a film like ‘2001’, so they feel inhuman, a degree of perfection beyond the ‘uncanny valley‘ of robotics.
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