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“2001: A Space Odyssey,” directed by Stanley Kubrick and released in 1968, is renowned to this day for its groundbreaking special effects. The most iconic include the visually stunning depiction of space travel, from the “Blue Danube” waltz of spacecraft in flight to the harrowing spacewalks, and finally, the “ultimate trip” stargate sequence. But the one sequence full of visual trickery is the one no one would guess.
“The Dawn of Man” depicts an evolutionary tipping point of early human ancestors. For it, the film employed front projection on a scale never before seen. This technique involved projecting large format photographs onto a half-silvered “beamsplitter” mirror set in front of the camera. This reflected the images onto a giant screen set at the end of the set, behind the actors. This screen was composed of retro-reflective Scotchlite material, which bounces light directly back at its source.
The result: the live set and the photographic backgrounds were combined on the spot, passing through the two-way mirror and into the camera lens. The technique is betrayed by the retinas of the leopard seen in two shots: its eyes, like the Scotchlite screen, reflect the light from the projector. To anyone not directly in the path of the reflected light, all you’d see was a blank gray screen.
There’s only one shot of an ape-man filmed outdoors: the iconic bone thrown into the sky, shot in a studio parking lot.
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