It has been frequently claimed that the moon landings were faked somewhere in the Nevada desert - or Area 51 or the barren jard behind Joe's garage. And the main claim is always that is has been done by slow-motion frames. This has been refuted and disproven several times so I won't go into the physics side anymore but will try a different angle.

Stanley Kubrik, the famous director of 2001, has often been referred to as the genius who has (allegedly!) faked the moon landings on a remote spot in the London suburbs.
And here's my challenge: if he was so apt and so good in faking the moon landing and if it's so easy to fake low gravity by slow-motion pictures then why doesn't the scene where Dr. Heywood Floyd walks down the trench to the monolith looks more convincing?
The group of scientist walking clumsily down the ramp don't look at all as if they're in low gravity. On the contrary, they look exactly as a group of actors pretending to walk as if in low gravity. And I maintain that nobody could be fooled into believing that this was filmed anywhere but on earth.
In fact, every Sciene Fiction movie has refrained from "faking" low gravity (be it on the Moon , Mars or Deneb IV) by slow motion because it is not so easy to deceive the eye. And the movie Apollo 13 even took on to "fake" weightlessness with parabolic flights to make it convincing.

Maybe this thought experiment helps to convince some of the the hoaxters ;-)

Extracelestial

P.S.
To anybody offended by my critisism of the TMA scene - I'm a big fan of this movie and still enjoy it tremendously.

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke

For shame, the great 2001 slagged off....

Can I add a "I think you have to take it further"?

The whole fake business needs to be defined by anyone holding it up as "stands to reason". Flag, on a set. Men on the moon, on wires and on and on.

Problem as I see it is the world was watching and listening. To fake it and match any transmissions then it needs to be filmed in one go. No set pieces. So that is the landing, filming, shots taken on the moon. All the experiments and data from etc need to happen in time as it would have, either way you believe it. It could not be done in set pieces. To achieve that in my opinion is a step too far for the film industry. The "actors" live on the set in real time and carry out and shoot all the images as it happens. CGI, non existent. No photoshop and no way to hide wires. It needs to be seen to be transmitted back from the moon in real time.


Big problem me thinks. Then there are faked transmissions sent to the moon and back to support it all.

Just a few ramblings.

Faking going to the moon would be harder than actually going!

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The faking part is something that puzzles me though I know it should not. It appears not to be thought through. 2001 tried to be accurate to physics as I understand. The pen in the craft going to the station was done on a glass plate if memory serves me. No computers to CGI it or post production erase wires. The Discovery set was a huge ferris type wheel and so on. That all took special skills to make it look so good. That meant effects people in numbers.

You win the Nobel Prize for Understatement!

Truth is, they faked it on the moon.

Is that so ... I thought the CT'ers had proof by now that the moon was fake

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"Nature is obliged to let reality determine its laws, whereas mathematics is under no such constraint."

The Truman Show comes to mind.

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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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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

I disagree - they look like slow motion. Take a look at any real moon footage, especially when the astronauts actually stumbled and fell. You simply cannot reproduce that with slow motion

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In the appalling Capricorn One, which serves as rubric for many HBers, when the astronauts jumped onto the Martian surface, Hal Holbrook ordered temporary slow-motion effects. Of course the catch was, that wasn't the only place in the "fakery" where lower-than-Earth gravitational acceleration would have been observed. But, that's Hollywood/HBers.

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Yeah. Can I have it in chocolate please?

Just me being naive. Amazed at times as to the lack of understanding of things or thought put into it.

I had to look up rubric and my eyes glazed over reading the definition. They were half glazed already though. Could have been the pink background of the first hit.

Anyway, how about those HBs?

I got nothing...again.

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Next you'll be saying that gravity can penetrate the airtight hull of a spacecraft. Sheesh, you Apollogists will believe anything.

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But see, Kubrick would have been foolish to actually use the same methods to fake the moon footage that he did to film 2001. In fact, every director of every film that deals with space is under a secret governmental contract that forbids them from using the same technology that was used for the fake landing. That's why, even today, none of them look as real as the Apollo ones.

Anything can be rationalized if you're willing to take it to irrational lengths.

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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

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Hi Tog,
true but Kubrick even being on the governments payroll was more free to do what he wanted. He was, as far as I know, the only director which had a blanque cheque from MGM to film whatever he wanted.
However, I see the point your making. So how's this one: even if Kubrik didn't share his secret receipe how to perfectly fake Moon gravity how comes that nobody in the mean time found out? The moon landing is almost forty years old and there have been many gifted directors who could have reinvent Kubriks technique. Let's propose to Quentin Tarrantino to make a nice deep space zombie romance set on Arisia.
Extracelestial

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke

Yep. It's just like the Shakespeare thing, Everyone knows it was not he who wrote the plays, it was another man of the same name, who lived in the same places at the same time, who did it.

I actually saw a HBer claim that the landing was a hoax, because in a vacuum like the lunar surface, the astronauts would be floating around just like they do during a space walk.

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I have heard several make the same claims about the dust and rocks.

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