What a great essay. Worth the read. "Upon reaching Jupiter, Bowman is guided into a wormhole, triggering Trumbull’s bravura psychedelic sequence. On either sid

What a great essay. Worth the read. "Upon reaching Jupiter, Bowman is guided into a wormhole, triggering Trumbull’s bravura psychedelic sequence. On either side of a perpendicular line dividing the screen, two vertical planes of brightly colored lights and shapes emerge, rushing past and out of frame, giving the illusion that Bowman (glimpsed in a juddering cutaway shot and then in paralytic stills) is racing through a corridor of infinite dimensions at speed-of-light intensity. Modeled in part after the avant-garde films of Jordan Belson (who later created special effects for The Right Stuff) and fraternal animators James and John Whitney (collaborators with Saul Bass on Vertigo’s title sequence), Trumbull recreated screen space with his slit-scan technique, combining long exposures of circuit board diagrams, Op Art prints, film negatives, and electron microscope photographs for this sequence, which cleverly exploited the simple x and y axis geometry of an ideally proportioned widescreen frame." That scene is probably my favorite movie scene of all times. My dad was a big fan of 2001, and made me watch the movie when I was 13 or so- I missed a lot of the subtleties, but that last part of the movie added a new layer to existence that I could have never conceived of before. For a nerdy teenager who was really into science and sci-fi, it was mind blowing to be exposed to such an artistic depiction of the subjectivity of the human perception of time and space, and the ambiguity of reality. It's interesting to read the techniques that went into making it - it's a very creative use of the medium. I can't help but feel that CGI has put special effects designer into a box of vertices and polygons, resulting in special effects that all look the same. I certainly can't think of a single movie that has something as unique and distinctive as the wormhole scene in 2001. I had high hopes for Interstellar, but it fell very flat (there are some groups doing very cool work in more traditional animation however - I really like Studio Laika, for instance).