So that's why foreground objects never quite look right when there is blue screen work. It worked alright on LOTR. Did they just not use blue in the foreground or where they usually some of that digital magic to get around the problem?

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

One of the things I think helped LotR is that they recoloured the entire combined image for most of the movie(s). With the colours all being matched like that they looked like they were all a single image that belonged together rather than composities.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Humphrey - look at Bob B.'s link. We've already tried. Feel free to give it another shot, but chances are that GTI Publishing is a dummy company created by Hawkins. It is so easy to self publish nowadays.

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

I begin to wonder if this is not just a scheme to separate suckers from their money. Given the possible tax-fraud evidence of one of the previous sites, its possible this person is a knowing huckster trying to capture some cash from the Art Bell/Nancy/Fab four crowd.
I weep for those that read this book, and fear for those that believe it.

Just making sure that the American version of it didn't mysteriously appear and contact info was given on the book.

I think you may be a bit confused. The only version is American. The whole thing appears to be taking place in Minnesota. The real GTI Publishing - i.e. - the British company is not involved with this at all.

I'm pretty certain it did mysteriously appear. I remember doing a lot of research on this when it came up the last time and I had a boring job instead of a stimulating day life as a student.

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

We fairly conclusively ruled out the U.K. GTI Publishing. Someone contacted them and ascertained that they had never heard of Hawkins.

We were briefly misled by the bibliographic records in various libraries that listed the publisher as GTI of New York. There is no GTI Publishing in New York. After it was given as a Minnesota company with an address, it was easier to track down. I don't believe we ever found a telephone listing for them in Minneapolis or St. Paul. But the address they gave is down in the dock/warehouse district. I believe it exists in one form or another, but I also believe it's not a legitimate publishing house.

Whoever Hawkins is, he's pretty good at creating a paper trail. I don't think this is a joke in the sense of doing it for a lark to yank our chains. An awful lot of effort has been expended to make this happen. I think this is a fairly professional effort at grifting. "Hawkins" rips off the NASAScam site, prints it, and then creates all this phony semblance of novelty and professionalism. And given that he's been connected to other dubious money-making schemes, I think this is just another of them.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

So that's why foreground objects never quite look right when there is blue screen work.

Yes. There is usually a noticeable loss of contrast in the foreground compared to the background, and the color cast of the foreground elements is usually off.

The advantage to this over the sodium process is that you don't need special equipment or stock for the camera. You just shoot with regular film. All the magic happens in the darkroom.

It worked alright on LOTR. Did they just not use blue in the foreground or where they usually some of that digital magic to get around the problem?

Lord of the Rings was digitally composited. The traditional color separation methods are purely analog, darkroom methods involving the photochemistry of the film. Digital compositing works with the full color image as a digital data set. You don't have any of the generational problems because the process isn't based on making multiple copies of film through filters. You simply instruct the computer to treat a narrow range of hue, value, and saturation as the "key" color and let the background show through.

The process we used in 2000 has in common with the processes of 1985 only the notion of shooting against a monochromatic background. How the separation happens is completely different.

With modern films you can also have digital color grading. Grade describes the smooth blends of dark to light and from color to color in film (one of the things you lose through duplication). And so the process of grading a film for color means you adjust the development and printing process so that the colors and intensities match from shot to shot. Historically this has been very important in film, where the colors you see on the set are not the colors that show up on film. Remember those nice red command uniforms in "Star Trek Voyager"? In real life they're actually pink. These days color grading is digital. Since you already have most of the film in digital format, you can do color correction with the digital images. Previously it had to be done by changing the color of the printing lights.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Damn! I always liked the apparent shade of the red on those uniforms.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

Relating to the compositing techniques sub thread:

Two extremely good books on the topic are: "ILM Journal. The Art of Special Effects", and its newer counter-part "Into the Digital Realm". While being a showcase of the work of the Lucasfilm Company ILM, they go into a great deal of explanation of the process. They also use well-known scenes from familiar effects films to demonstrate what is being explained.

Cheers,
Dwight

That reminds me of some of the alternate universe science fiction where Glenn Miller is a nuclear physicist, Eisenhower is a baseball star, and Babe Ruth is a jazz musician, all fighting the alien Nazi's.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Yes, more please. That first bit was hiliariously asinine.

What is the quality of the photos in the book? If it's anything like the quality of the images on the Web site the photos would be practically useless.

Some of the photos are good and some of them are like the website. He does the Hoagland thing of expanding them up really large to find hidden objects. The are many pages devoted to hidden cats, dogs birds, snake, and even a tumbleweed.

Here's some more fun stuff.

Early on in the book he mentions are the people who mysteriously died.

Tom Barron

and the following astronauts.

Ted Freeman
Bassett and See
The Apollo 1 crew
C.C. Williams
Ed Givens

and

Robert Lawerence
Mike Adams

Robert Lawernce was a USAF/MOL astronaut who died in a plane crash during landing, but somehow NASA was able to spare his co-pilot

Mike Adams was a X-15 pilot who crashed in the desert after the X-15 he was flying started spinning.

The funniest thing about this part of the book is that three chapters later, he has a picture of John Young and Gus Grissom sitting on the hood of a car and he claims it is from the summer of 1969. Gus died in Jan. 1967.

Dwight, please edit your post and replace the long Amazon link with a BBcode short link. Instructions are on the BBcode link on your post window, down under Options below the emoticon legend.

The long link is playing havoc with screen display width, forcing sideways scrolling. We don't like sideways scrolling.

Thanks.

I wonder how long it's going to be until this guy appears on C2C :-k

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Those who repeat History are doomed to learn it.

Well,

I finally did some indepth reading of this book last night. I read about half of the book. It goes pretty quickly. There's lots of pictures and the font is fairly large, 12 point I think. The writting is not too bad. Also larger than average spaces between paragraphs too.

Here's what I found so far.

Charles Hawkins was born in 1962 and supposedly was a "Whiz Kid" himself. He claims to have been the best auto mechanic in his area at age 14. At age 16 he claims to have entered college and studied "Industrial Mechanics," and lists a few classes he took there. Just your basic freshmen and sophmore classes. The good thing about his list is that he is specific in listing the classes, like fluid mechanics and thermodynamics, so if there ever is a debate between Jay or BA or someone else who is actually an engineer, it will be very easy to show him to be a fraud. Of course no college or completion of a degree is mentioned.

He them claims to have gone to Northwestern Technical Institute and recieved a degree in Computer Science with a major in robotics and industrial electronics. He then says that he spent the next 20 years working in this field. Doing the math says that he must of graduated around 1983.

There are only two problems with this story. First, Northwestern Technical Institute didn't exist until 1998, and second, the school doesn't offer a degree in computer science. Took me about a minute of googling to find that out. In other words, I'm not telling the truth.

The funny part of the book so far is his statements that NASA will probably try to kill him off after the book is released. He also claims to have all his data backed up using encrypted algorithms and a pot of hidden money to ensure that his findings will be published in case of death. Sounds like a hint of Kaysing here. He doesn't need to worrying, because there are not any technical details in his book.

JR, do you think we can safely say that the build up of Hawkins' credentials and accomplishments referenced in the following Web page are greatly exaggerated.

http://www.authorsandexperts.com/sea...p?recordid=612

I think "greatly exaggerated" is right on target. I think this quote from the Authors and Experts site says it best.

"Then there are other moon landing hoax theories of Mr. Hawkins that are so ridiculously funny and silly sounding, it will make the show a lot of fun. One minute your audience is going to be laughing their heads off and ... "

That describes the book quite nicely.

So, presuming that the arguments in the book are not much better than the arguments on the web site (i.e., blatantly and crudely fabricated photos), then what are the chances neither the book nor the web site is meant to be taken seriously?

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base