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SPACE RETRO

SPACE RETRO

Early history of the solar system. Our Earth and a former moon collide.

‘Universe: A Computer-Generated Voyage Through Time and Space’, a book, I co-authored, as image maker, in ’91, with famed astronomer Nigel Henbest. The idea of this book was to use the latest tech of the day (including early computers) to illustrate things which were essentially un-photographable. Un=photographable, either because the featured events and scenes are outside our time (like, ‘beginning of the universe’), or because spacecraft had not yet been there..

Surface of Triton. Shot on 8×10″ film. The set – ice in a specially made freezer tank in the studio with liquid nitrogen fog.

This is a small fairly interesting one-off collection. It is cute/quaint, not only because space technology has come so far in the last 30 years that many phenomena have been imaged ‘for real’. For example, I used a chunk of concrete as a comet and we now have numerous close up images of comets..

Digitally generated planetary surface.

It is also quaint because many of most of the image making special effects techniques used for the book, were elaborate (such as using liquid nitrogen with frozen ice landscapes), but would never be used today now that we have 3D CGI. An illustrated blog entry on the subject – with behind the scene images – is here http://philipchudy.com/blog/?p=3520

Raw film image showing a rendition of the Martian surface before the planet lost surface water. This was shot in miniature, colored ice in a tank, seeded with liquid nitrogen. Distance from foreground to horizon was only 4 ft.