2001:  Film, Cameras and Lenses

This page documents the specific filming technology that was used to make the film 2001: a Space Odyssey.

The movie, which was shot in the mid 1960s and released in 1968, was obviously filmed, edited, and projected entirely using film. Decent video, and any kind of digital, cinematography were many decades away. That's pretty straightforward. But 2001 was a 70mm movie, billed as “Cinerama, filmed in Super Panavision”, and there's a lot of confusion about what exactly that all meant.

This page is, incidentally, a work in progress, and being updated as new information comes along.

The big screen experience

First, a little history about film and how it works.

Flexible strips of film were the only way to show a moving image for many years. But the advent of broadcast television in the 1950s got film studios and cinemas very concerned. Moving pictures in the home, as low-quality and black and white as they initially were, were already becoming a serious threat to getting bums in the seats of movie theatres.

So studios, particularly America's Hollywood giants, sunk a lot of money throughout the 1950s and 1960s into enhanced film technology. They vastly improved image and sound quality, initially with big-budget productions, making the experience of going to a film theatre much more enticing to the general public. During this period many different technologies were developed, released, and abandoned as the studios jockeyed to get an advantage over their rivals. Systems like Cinerama, CinemaScope, Todd-AO, MGM Camera 65, Super Panavision, VistaVision, Ultra Panavision, and many more all hit cinemas with lurid promises of hyper-realistic moviegoing experiences.

The images we now take for granted on large-screen flat TVs all point back to this explosion of technological innovation in the middle of the last century.

Five ways of improving movie technology

So, let's cover the basics. There were five primary technologies used successfully to improve the filmgoing experience in the 1950s: colour, widescreen, anamorphic lenses, large frame film, and multichannel sound.

I don't go into other inventions like 3D technologies, high framerates, seat vibrators, and Smell-O-Vision – some ingenious, some silly – that were introduced as well. Mainly because they don't have anything to do with 2001. Which is good, since I don't think artificial smells for the Dawn of Man sequence would have been particularly pleasant.

Colour

Colour film wasn't exactly new in the 1950s. The faded-looking two-colour Kinemacolor system was used, mostly in Britain, from 1909, and the full-colour American Technicolor processes (especially Process 4, associated with films such as the Wizard of Oz) become popular in the 1930s.

But because of cost, most average-budget dramas were shot and released solely in black and white, and only big-budget films could justify the use of colour. Colour was therefore a distinguishing feature for identifying high-profile shows, through to the late 1960s. (consider that Kubrick filmed Dr. Strangelove in black and white, and it came out in 1964)

The arrival of Kodak Eastmancolor motion picture film in the early 1950s was an important breakthrough, since it was a “single strip” process, and much cheaper than the complex Technicolor processes, which used three separate strips of film. Technicolor also required huge amounts of light on stage.

Widescreen aspect ratio

The aspect ratio of a rectangle is basically a description of its shape: how wide it is versus how tall it is. A square has an aspect ratio of 1:1 since the top and sides are both 1 unit in size, relative to each other. A non-square rectangle would have an aspect ratio where one of the sides differs. Say, for example, 4:3 or 3:2. They can also be calculated with 1 as the denominator, such as 1.3:1 or 1.5:1, making comparisons easier. Ratios are the mathematical relationship between lengths of the two sides, and so have no units.

The aspect ratio of an image matters a lot, because the shape of the screen determines both how the cinema and screen are constructed and how the audience experiences the film. A wider image on a big screen typically feels more immersive to a viewer – like you're really there. One exception is IMAX movies, which are fairly tall in shape owing to their use of vertical stadium-style seating, versus traditional theatre seating with a shallower rake.

Academy ratio

Over many years silent black and white movies eventually standardized on a nearly square aspect ratio of 4:3 (or 1.33:1), which is slightly wider than it is tall. The advent of sound meant that part of the film had to be given over to an area that encoded the sound optically, and so the image area of the film decreased slightly. The result was a ratio of 1.375:1, which became known as the Academy Ratio after the US-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

For decades most movies were released using the Academy Ratio. Standard analogue television (NTSC, PAL, and SECAM), stayed with the silent-era 4:3 ratio.

Widescreen

However, many people noted that a wider field of view would make for a better film viewing experience than the Academy Ratio, since more of the image would appear in the viewer's peripheral vision. This would yield a more immersive effect when shown in a large theatre. Various attempts were made to produce and standardize on a widescreen format, but it wasn't until the early 1950s that widescreen movies became popular for big-budget blockbusters. These used a variety of ratios, such as 2.34:1, 1.85:1, 1.66:1, and so on.

Television remained 4:3 until the rise of widescreen video in the late 1990s. Widescreen TV, and contemporary digital streaming TV, is typically 1.78:1, often described as 16:9.

Anamorphic lenses

There are two basic types of lenses used to make cinematic movies: spherical lenses and anamorphic lenses. These terms refer to the optical design of the lens, not the physical shape of the overall lens body — those are nearly always metal cylinders filled with multiple chunks of polished round glass.

Spherical lenses are just like the lenses used in most still cameras. Imagining filming a square object with a camera. You look at the film negative and the square is recorded accurately as a square. Such a lens is called spherical because the curvature of the lens is effectively a curved segment of a larger imaginary sphere. The horizontal and vertical curvatures of the lens are identical.

(Note to nitpickers: yes, aspherical lens elements are now often used in camera lenses, but the distinction between spherical and anamorphic predates and ignores this fact)

Anamorphic

Anamorphic is a clever trick, invented conceptually in the 1920s by astronomer and optical inventor Henri Chrétien, used for filming movies that have a super-wide field of view (a wide aspect ratio). The lens itself is still made of spherical lens components. But the lens is fitted with, or includes, a special optical device which takes the incoming image and squashes it horizontally. The result is a picture on the negative that looks compressed and tall. Viewing the negative, the square that we filmed would look like a tall rectangle.

The projector is then fitted with its own anamorphic optical element to unsquash the image as it's projected. The result is a big widescreen picture, and our on-screen square looks square again. Anamorphic technology thus allows for a projected image to have a wider aspect ratio than an equivalent spherical-shot film, given the same film format. 1953's CinemaScope, the first real anamorphic system, used ordinary 35mm film stretched out to an aspect ratio of 2.55:1, without the cost of increasing the film size.

Anamorphic effects

There are some characteristic side-effects of anamorphic processes that are well-known to perceptive filmgoers. For example, bright highlights (car headlamps, flashlights held by filmic heroes in spooky night scenes, etc) can have anamorphic lens flare - those bright horizontal slashes of light. Changes in focus (racking focus) also cause background areas to seemingly expand or contract; an effect called anamorphic lens “breathing”.

The film and projection type really matters! I once went to see Blade Runner at a small neighbourhood cinema in Vancouver which, it turned out, had just opened that week. They'd received a 35mm anamorphic print of the film, but their projector was configured for spherical projections and they had no idea what they were doing. So the movie was, hilariously and unwatchably, squashed into a narrow mess. It made the effects sequences of flying through the skyscrapers particularly dizzying.

Large film stock

The size of the image area on a piece of film is also key to image quality. If the image area is small then it needs to be enlarged considerably for viewing purposes, thus amplifying the actual structure of the film image (film grain) as well. The result is a specklier or blurrier image than you might want. Larger film areas mean a more detailed image – but, of course, large film is bulkier, more expensive, and more complex to use.

8mm to 35mm

Home movies often used 8mm film (ie: strips of film exactly 8mm in width) and documentaries/news coverage 16mm, since those are cases where the image is rarely projected onto a large screen, and where cost is paramount.

By contrast, commercial movies were mostly shot using 35mm film. This gave a decent tradeoff between cost, convenience, and image quality. However, film grain and other artefacts were quite noticeable, especially with older film emulsion technology and the use of larger and wider screens in bigger theatres.

70mm film

By the 1950s, 70mm film started being used for high-profile blockbuster movies. This wide film offered vastly improved image quality – particularly finer grain – owing to roughly 3.5x the image area on the film surface as 35mm, and was well suited for widescreen Hollywood spectaculars.

The first 70mm film I ever saw was Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), and I remember watching the opening scene, showing Gandhi's assassin walking through a crowd, and being blown away by how realistic it felt.

However, since 70mm cost a lot more to use, and fewer cinemas had 70mm projectors than 35mm projectors, its use was always limited. As a medium it was also wholly impractical for intimate dramas. However, many blockbuster films of the 1970s and 80s were actually shot in 35mm, but “blown-up” and released as 70mm projection prints for key markets. Such a film didn't look as good as one actually shot on wide format film, but did look better than a 35mm film projected with a 35mm projector.

Sadly, the high costs of 70mm production means that hardly any true 70mm films have been made since the early 1970s. The development of finer-grained 35mm film and improved optics helped as well. Today, only a handful of big-budget movies from directors such as Christopher Nolan and Kenneth Branagh are shot for 70mm projection.

65mm and 70mm

Note one point of confusion: 70mm movies, even IMAX films, actually employ film stock that's 65mm wide in the camera. However, the film used to project the movie is a bit wider at 70mm, in order to accommodate sound. In other words, the 65mm stock is used for production, and the 70mm stock for distribution.

An extra 2.5mm of film is added onto each side of the sprocket holes, and this is used to store most of the audio information. Since the additional width is on the outside of the holes, the sprocket holes (known as perforations or perfs) are located the same width apart for both 65mm and 70mm film. However, the image area on 70mm film is slightly smaller than on 65mm film, because additional space is used for audio on the inside of the perfs.

Image orientation and IMAX

Most 70mm film technologies use a frame that's “vertical” on the film, with each frame taking up 5 perforations (5 perf). In other words, the wider length of the frame fits into the film width, just as almost all 35mm film does. The film is actually pulled upwards vertically in the camera and the projector.

However, IMAX 70mm films, invented in Canada in the late 1960s, use “horizontal” frames where the shorter length of the frame fits into the width, giving vastly more film area for improved image quality. IMAX 70mm is therefore 15 perf. It's pulled across the camera and projector horizontally.

Multichannel sound

Sound in movies was originally monaural, starting with the introduction of synchronized film sound in 1927 with The Jazz Singer. In other words, sound was encoded as a single channel – there wasn't even left and right, as we're used to with stereo. And, while revolutionary, early “talkies” really did not have very good sound quality.

Walt Disney was particularly dissatisfied with the tinny muffled sound of film soundtracks, and his 1940 film Fantasia experimented with sophisticated stereo techniques, and “Fantasound” even included a brief sequence in 3-channel audio.

However, it wasn't until 1952, and the introduction of Cinerama wide-screen technology, that multitrack audio was widely used. Incredibly Cinerama boasted seven separate tracks of sound with speakers located behind the screen – an absolute revelation at the time. Not only were left-right stereo soundtracks possible, but ambient sounds could be positioned across the frame. Subwoofers weren't the powerful gutwrenchers we know today, but deeper sounds also became possible.

So what was used to film 2001 ?

Finally, we get to the technical specifications for the filming of 2001: a Space Odyssey, in terms of the five criteria above.

• • 2001 was, of course, filmed in full colour. Specifically it seems it was shot on Eastman Kodak 50T 5251 film stock, processed using Eastmancolor technology at Technicolor’s London lab (actually in West Drayton near Heathrow Airport). The film was incredibly slow, by modern standards, since it was EI 50 film using tungsten white balance.

  • The aspect ratio was of course widescreen; more specifically 2.20:1.

  • Spherical lenses were used, not anamorphic.

  • 2001 was shot on 5-perf 65mm film and projected on 70mm film, making it a 70mm movie. Of course, versions were reduced to 35mm for theatres which didn't have 35mm projectors, and later on it was converted for TV broadcast, home video, digital theatre projection, and so on.

  • 2001 used 6 track audio; 5.1 in modern parlance.

What was Super Panavision?

During the closing credits of 2001, a title card reading “Filmed in Super Panavision®” appears.

Very simply, this was a marketing name for the 70mm spherical lenses and cameras supplied to the 2001 production team by American cinematography rental giant Panavision.

In other words, the term describes two separate things. First, it marks the movie as a being shot on 65mm film using spherical lenses, and projected on 70mm film. And second, it identifies that Panavision equipment was used.

The system was also called Super Panavision 70. And it's worth mentioning that other film systems – Todd-AO, MGM Camera 65, MCS 70 Superpanorama, Panavision System 65 – also used the exact same 65mm camera film/70mm projector film with spherical lenses. This is because Todd-AO came first and the others are actually copies of the Todd-AO system. They are thus fully interchangeable from a technical perspective; a point that Kubrick took advantage of when making 2001.

What was Cinerama?

Here begins a lot of confusion, since 2001 was also marketed as a “Cinerama” film in addition to Super Panavision.

The confusion arises because the name “Cinerama” was used for three different and incompatible filmmaking systems, plus many of the cinemas themselves.

1) The invention of three-strip Cinerama

Cinerama was initially the name of a complex three-lens system used to make immersive widescreen films; a technology generally known today as “three strip” or “three panel” Cinerama, though it wasn't called that at the time. The thing was the creation of American inventor Fred Waller, working with a team of other film pioneers. Cinerama is, incidentally, an anagram of “American” though that’s apparently just a coincidence!

The spectacle of Cinerama

The first Cinerama movie was introduced to the public in 1952, and a handful of movies was released using the process. The invention ushered in a new era of cinematic experience.

The technology

True 1950s Cinerama was extremely cumbersome, expensive, and complex. A massive 35mm film camera, equipped with three 27mm wide-angle lenses, was used for filming. The camera contained three separate camera movements (mechanisms), for recording the scene seen by each lens to three separate reels of film. A single rotating shutter was used by all three lenses, guaranteeing that the footage was properly synchronized. The image on each spool of film was the same width as usual 35mm film, but about 50% taller (6 perf versus 4 perf).

Projection of Cinerama movies to an audience was a real technical challenge, since three separate 35mm projectors (each controlled realtime by three projectionists in three booths) were needed to show the image on an enormous curved screen made of over a thousand vertical Venetian-blind-like lattices. However the huge width of the screen – it had an aspect ratio of 2.65:1 – meant that films could show images in a viewer's peripheral vision for the first time.

Cinerama films were naturally always in full colour, using Kodak Eastmancolor film. A notable exception is the first movie shot using the format, This is Cinerama, which deliberately starts with a boring talking head introduction shot in Academy ratio black and white, before the curtains open to thrust the gasping audience into a dramatic widescreen rollercoaster sequence (the fact that a gigantic mechanical three-camera system could work at all on a roller coaster is pretty amazing).

Cinerama also introduced multitrack sound; what we now call surround sound. In an era of mono soundtracks, Cinerama supported an incredible seven track audio. Remarkably, the sound was played back from its own reel of magnetically coated 35mm film. This was separate from the picture reels themselves, and the three projectors and the audio playback machine were linked by a complex interlocking system.

Films shot in Cinerama were thus an incredible spectacle and amusement-park experience. This is Cinerama, for example, was primarily a travelogue filled with scenes designed to bowl the audience over, such as aerial views over Niagara Falls and the American West, a gondola ride through Venice, and a choreographed waterskiing exhibition. It also contained a rather unimaginatively staged excerpt from an opera, to show how valuable it was for promoting high culture.

Problems with Cinerama

However, as a format for actual movies it was doomed. Numerous technical limitations made Cinerama really problematic for narrative storytelling. In fact, only two three-strip Cinerama films were ever made that were basically narrative in nature: The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won.

One of the biggest problems was that you couldn’t change the field of view (ie: focal length) with three-strip Cinerama. The camera was forever fixed to a panoramic field of view of 146°. This made closeups and intimate dialogue scenes effectively impossible. It's interesting to note that contemporary VR headsets have not dissimilar problems in terms of presenting narrative content in an immersive environment.

Another problem was that shooting with three cameras meant you had three separate planes of visual information being recorded and then projected on a curved surface. Horizontal lines would appear crooked and bent because of parallax issues. (the waterskiing sequence in This is Cinerama looked really bad because of this) And of course, two shimmering rows of sprocket holes were visible on-screen where the three projections overlapped. Even getting each of the three strips of film to look perfectly identical in terms of brightness and colour was difficult, especially in the 1950s when colour timing/grading technology was less sophisticated than today. (though to improve matters the three panels of film were actually spliced together in a single reel for processing, so at least they were all done simultaneously)

Visual and technical problems aside, three-strip films were also incredibly expensive to make, and expensive to show.

2) Cinerama 360°

In 1962 and 1964 the name Cinerama 360° was used for a pair of short films shown at two American World's Fairs – Seattle and New York. The movies used a specially designed 160° lens, built by a company called Fairchild-Curtis, and were projected on the interiors of large domes.

This sidenote is of particular interest to 2001 aficionados because the one-off Fairchild-Curtis lens was later used by Kubrick to film interior scenes in 2001. He obviously didn't use it for dome projections or anything, of course.

This distinction between normal curved-screen Cinerama and the dome-projection Cinerama 360° is a bit like the difference between normal IMAX and Omnimax; later dubbed IMAX Dome.

3) The switch to one-strip 70mm Cinerama

The inconvenience and expense of the whole three-camera/three-projector business meant that no three-strip Cinerama film was made after 1963. (though trivia fans will point out that a Soviet copy of Cinerama, Kinopanorama, survived until 1966, and a couple short films using Soviet cameras were made in the 1990s)

However, to preserve their investment in the brand name and the expensive curved-screen theatres built for the system, Cinerama switched to single-strip film, 70mm wide. The first one-strip Cinerama film was 1963’s It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Between 1963 and 1970 something over a dozen 70mm films, both spherical and anamorphic, were marketed as “Cinerama” productions.

When shown in Cinerama theatres with curved screens, these 70mm movies had an immersive wraparound quality similar to three-strip processes. The overall image resolution of single-strip 70mm was lower, but you didn’t have all the technical problems associated with three-strip. In a funny sort of way it's like the way contemporary IMAX theatres use IMAX branding to show digitally-projected films, even though the image quality is far lower than the expensive 70mm film-based IMAX process. (though to be fair, film IMAX doesn't have really glaring problems like the Cinerama seams)

I've read the claim that 70mm Cinerama showings involved adding extra optics to the projector to show the film, but from what I can tell that was only the case with anamorphic Ultra Panavision 70 movies, and not spherical Super Panavision 70 movies.

4) Movie theatres

Finally, the name was also used to brand many of the cinemas in which Cinerama movies were shown. For example, two such theatres that still exist today in the US are the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles and the Seattle Cinerama. The former's future is unknown, and the latter is now known as the SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) Cinema Downtown owing to licensing problems with the name “Cinerama”.

So. What film process was used for 2001?

2001, which was released in 1968, was one of those Cinerama-branded one-strip 70mm films. It thus did not use a three-strip process – it was billed as a Super Panavision movie, and was projected using 70mm film in Cinerama theatres.

At its initial release 2001 was shown reserved-seat long-run “roadshow” style, in both Cinerama theatres and regular 70mm-equipped theatres. And the former, projected on the enormous curved screens and accompanied by the Cinerama branding, seems to have given some viewers the impression that they were watching a three-strip movie. This is unfortunately a myth that endures to this day. Finally, prints were struck in 35mm for distribution to regular theatres.

Interestingly, Kubrick didn't really shoot 2001 with a curved screen in mind. Douglas Trumbull is quoted in the June 1994 issue of Cinefantastique magazine as saying:

“During the entire production of the film, we never once viewed footage on a curved screen or in the (70mm) format. What would happen is we'd shoot in 65mm, but the lab would generate 35mm anamorphic prints for us to look at. So throughout the production, all we saw were 35mm anamorphic prints on a small, flat screen. We never saw it in a Cinerama theatre.

It wasn't until the very, very end of photography, or maybe once during production, that I think Kubrick took a couple of 70mm prints and went down to a 70mm theatre to see how it looked. I wasn't there, I wasn't privy to that. So, in a sense, the movie was not made with a curved screen in mind.

In some of the Cinerama theatres there was a serious projection problem, because the projection booths were mounted up too high and you had a horrible sort of curved, keystoning effect: the titles would come out badly curved and it looked very distorted.”

The Panavision Cameras

I don't have a comprehensive list of the cameras used to film 2001 at this time. But here are some notes about some of them, which were rented from Panavision via UK distributor Samuelson Film Service Limited of London. Samuelson had to bring the gear over from the US, because they didn't hold inventory of 65mm gear normally.

At least one of the Super Panavision 70 cameras seen on 2001 sets bears a “for Cinerama” plaque for marketing reasons. Many of these cameras, such as the one below, are absolutely gigantic because they had thick soundproofing “blimps” around them to prevent the clattering sound of the camera mechanism from being picked up by the microphones used to record dialogue. You can also see that the word “SUPER” on the top is a separate plate, which could be removed and changed to “ULTRA” when the camera was used for filming Ultra Panavision 70 footage.

This camera seems to be marked on continuity reports as “SC 101”, and I think this may be a reference to the Panavision name “Silenced Studio Camera” (ie: blimped). Internally it used a Mitchell rackover FC 65mm camera. Rackover cameras had a mechanism that let the operator slide, or “rack”, part of the camera over to one side so that the scene could be viewed and composed by looking through the lens. The external finder would be aligned at this time as well. The camera would then need to be racked back so that the taking lens would be projecting images correctly onto the film.

Unblimped cameras were also used for scenes where on-set audio didn't matter. A Panavision-branded Mitchell AC 65mm camera can be seen inside the alien hotel room, and presumably that was also used for other scenes as well. This camera, serial 6552, was eventually purchased by Debbie Reynolds and auctioned to the public in 2011 via auction house Profiles in History. This may be the camera listed on continuity reports as simply “Mitchell”.

The film’s brief handheld sequences, such as the TMA/monolith excavation ramp and Bowman walking through the pod bay and climbing the ladder, were shot by Kubrick himself, using a Super Panavision “Panaflex” handheld camera — 24 pounds/11 kilos of 1960s film technology! It supported a 500 foot film magazine that ran for a bit over 4 minutes, and had a separate Mitchell viewfinder. This camera is listed in continuity reports as “HH 103”. Because of its relative compactness and light weight it was also used in a custom tilting mechanism built for filming some of the Discovery centrifuge scenes.

2001 was filmed in the UK, making it easy for Kubrick to operate the camera himself on occasion (union rules were allegedly a complication for directors who wanted to operate in the US). I don't know if he's grimacing in the photo below because he's squinting in concentration, struggling with the weight of the film literally on his shoulder, or coping with the motor noise blasting into his right ear! Maybe all three.

Was only Panavision gear used in 2001?

No. Since 1964, Panavision has famously only rented gear to production companies, and doesn't permit the sale of their kit. And I don't think they ever released a circular fisheye lens for their format. The widest lens they offered, so far as I know, was 28mm. 

But there are many scenes in the movie that were clearly shot with much shorter focal lengths than 28mm. (the shorter the focal length of a lens, the wider the field of view) The film has tons of extremely wide-angle shots, such as the pod bay, Discovery centrifuge, EVA pod interior, and the alien hotel room, which could not have been filmed using Panavision equipment at the time. And of course the HAL point of view shots used a circular fisheye.

Kubrick's use of Super Panavision was therefore rather complicated. Douglas Trumbull was interviewed on this topic in 2005, and said:

“There was a commitment to Super Panavision, they called it Cinerama, but (Kubrick) was feeling kind of frustrated with the lenses available from Panavision for that medium. So we started experimenting with Nikon lenses and he found out that the Nikon lenses, which were designed for the 35mm slide format, actually had a field of image at the back of the lenses that was enough to cover the 65mm film format, which was just a little larger. And so, even though we were forbidden from publicly announcing that Nikon lenses were being used, we were using them all the time.”

Fortunately, as noted earlier, Super Panavision 70, Todd-AO, and MCS-70/Superpanorama 70 were compatible 65mm spherical processes with the same aspect ratio of 2.20:1. (2001 did not use Ultra Panavision 70, which was an anamorphic process with an aspect ratio of 2.76:1) This gave fact gave Kubrick some choices, though he couldn’t advertise the fact since the film was officially a Super Panavision 70 movie.

Other Cameras

Many live action segments of 2001 were filmed using Todd-AO cameras, as can be seen clearly in behind the scenes photographs. Pictures also exist showing that the psychedelic sequence was filmed by a Todd-AO camera on the “slit-scan” rig built by Douglas Trumbull.

These old Todd-AO cameras were apparently based around “Fearless” 65mm cameras from the 1930s, built for the shortlived Fox Grandeur 70mm system, amazingly enough. They had exposed belts and pulleys for the take-up reel on the magazine and looked totally ancient. The most common live-action scenes to be filmed with Todd-AO cameras used the enormous 160° Fairchild-Curtis lens, which was a one-off lens built for special effects work in the early 1960s.

Finally, I’ve heard the claim that certain effects sequences – specifically some of the colour-altered aerial footage in the Stargate sequence – may also have used European MCS-70/Superpanorama 70 cameras, though I've only seen references to it here. The idea would have made sense, since the MCS Field Camera was relatively light weight for a 65mm camera, and included a rotating mirror mechanism that meant framing was much easier; all ideal for aerial photography.

Interestingly, one behind the scenes photograph clearly shows a 35mm Mitchell BNC camera inside the centrifuge. This seems to have been used to film the brief interview scene where the two astronauts are sitting casually at the HAL console, with their backs to HAL. (a somewhat inexplicable scene – where was the camera supposed to be, narratively?) The BNC's footage was then reduced optically, since the simulated IBM proto-iPads on the dining table had screens lit by 16mm projectors.

The video display animation seen throughout the movie (well, except during the prehistoric Earth sequence!) was also shot on 35mm film. A Mitchell camera was used with a modified Oxberry animation stand to create the film-based “computer” animation. Like the IBM Newspads, the computer displays used 16mm projectors, requiring the 35mm footage to be transferred to the smaller film gauge.

Lenses

This is an incomplete section, since I don't have a very comprehensive list of what lenses were used in 2001. But here's a start.

From what I've been able to find, Panavision offered the following lenses in Super Panavision 70 around that time:

28mm T2.8
35mm T2.8
50mm T2.0
75mm T2.8
100mm T2.5
150mm T3

Of these, the 28mm, 50mm, 75mm, and 100mm lenses are noted in some of the continuity reports from the film.

All the extreme wide-angle shots were filmed using the unusual Fairchild-Curtis lens.

An Angénieux 25-250mm T3.9 zoom, “Panavised” (adapted by Panavision) to fit the PV lens mount, was used in the lipsync scene in the pod bay. The scene was actually conceived and filmed as a zoom, first showing the astronauts' mouths, then zooming out to show the outside of the pod window. Bowman is then seen turning the audio switches back on. But in the end the zoom was not included and we just get the pan back and forth between them.

The lens used to film the HAL point of view scenes is not known with certainty, though I've proposed the theory that it was the same Nikkor (Nikon) 8mm f/8 used to make the HAL faceplate props. I've written a long article on that subject.

Digital releases

Today 2001 is commonly projected for public performance using digital data. The current digital distribution version was scanned by Warners, apparently from the 65mm interpositive protection print (the original camera negative is said to exist, but is damaged). It was done in Burbank USA at 8K (7680 x 4320 pixels) resolution using FotoKem’s Imagica “Bigfoot” scanner (a modified wet-transfer film gate optical printer). This version was downsampled to 4K (3840 x 2160 pixels at a bit depth of 10 using HEVC/H.265 encoding) for both streaming video and home sales as a 4K/UHD Blu-Ray disc.

The 8K scan, incidentally, was used by Japanese network NHK for the world’s first 8K TV broadcast on 1 December 2018. This broadcast had subtitles burned into the image data.

Unlike many other SF classics such as Star Trek: the Original Series, Star Wars and Blade Runner, the digital scan of 2001 has not been content-altered from the original movie footage. In other words scratches, colour grading, and other issues were resolved, but no modifications such as object retouching, CGI inserts, or replacements were performed.

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