Quote:
Originally Posted by Ilya
Sorry, but that's not true. "Outland" (set on Io) and "Adventures of Pluto Nash" (on the Moon) have slow-motion low gravity scenes. A couple Russian SF movies do also, and I am sure there are more I am not aware of. And I daresay that for viewers who do not know what motion in lunar gravity really looks like, they are fairly convincing.
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Hi Ilya,
with all due respect I disagree.
When speeding up the moon walks to "normal" speed then the astronauts do not look at all as if they move in normal; i.e. earth's gravity, but as if wobbling and toggling even more weirdly along the moon dust as before. This looks even less natural than before. Either way, they don't appear to move in earth's gravity.
Your proposition that without knowing what real motion in low gravity looks like you can't distinguish it from a faked one is moot. It is basically a rehearsal of the moon rock argument: if you haven't ver seen a moon rock then how do you know it's not a meteorite? But this is simple: you expect some features of the rock. Any school kid from, say Alaska, could distinguish a pebble picked up from a river bed from one gathered in the Nevada desert. One you expect to be dry and mostly devoid of life whereas the other you expect to be affected by water and even some moss growing on it. You don't need a PhD in geology for that.
The same applies to motion in low gravity compared to earth gravity. When speeding up motion of an astronaut I do expect not only him moving faster but also a free falling object. I expect him to have still similar reflexes. This could be seen when Harrison Schmidt tripped. Reflexes fast (Hand going down to stabilize, feet kicking and the dust he kicked up fell as fast as he did) and normal.
The slowly mowing astronauts in several SciFI flicks don't do reality justice. If you watch astronauts in real weightlessness then you can observe that their motion, reflexes and grabbing appears natural - swift and smooth whereas astronauts in movies often behave motionwise as if a great resistance would impede their motion. In fact, they appear more like deep sea divers. This is something that even the untrained eye can see and probably the very reason why Ron Howard decided to do Apollo XIII in real weightlesness and not by slow-mo. Which by the way, would have been far cheaper but less convincing.
Have a look, Astronauts on the ISS, a Soyuz or the Shuttle show quite natural motion except that they don't grab for a falling objet but a floating one.
I do like Outland but there are several inconsitencies in this movie. To name one: as soon as the staff is inside the station they move as if they are in earth's gravity and only outside they jump weirdly. This is something you can't achieve without Cavorite and even more proof that faking the real thing might be harder than the real one.
Which russian movies do you refer to? I'd be interested to watch some.
Extracelestial