clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

>
> Also, if 2-axis rotation of asteroits were more realistic, Kubrick would
> have made his special FX team work overtime to make the impossible possible.

Hmm; I think the physical set-up for filimg two-axis rotation would have
presented a problem.

Having worked in the physical special-effects field -- :-)  -- my initial
thought would be to build a simple 2-axis motorized rotation gimble, to hold the
asteroid model-- with a single rod attached to the 'inner' gimble for skewering
the model and holding it. (A chicken on a spit). For simplicity, think of the
inner gimble as rotation around x (in POV-Ray terms), and the outer gimble as
around z.

Depending on the camera position, the attachment rod's point of contact with the
model would be invisible most of the time (hidden by the asteroid itself.) But
eventually, that attachment point would rotate into a position that's visible to
the camera (with the rod obscuring a small part of the model, 'in front of it'
so to speak.) Having realized this problem from the get-go, I would have said
that, no, it can only rotate around one axis. Sorry, Stanley.

There's a much easier method to do this, of course: aim the camera at the
ceiling of the filming stage, and simply drop the asteroid from a good height,
past the camera. (Filming it in slow motion.) But Kubrick being Kubrick, he
would probably have given an emphatic thumbs-down to such a crude and
uncontrollable method.

Just sayin'  :-D

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