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Movies in Space?
Pentapod writes: "Surely this must have been submitted ... but I haven't seen it yet. A new module being planned on the International Space Station will include facilities for the first film studio in space. Angelina Jolie in zero-gravity, anyone?" And it's even named Enterprise, not for its bold, pioneering spirit, but for its commercial nature. *shrug* My guess is that it's cheaper to float your actors with special effects than to send them up and shoot them in real zero gravity.
They should have called it Babylon. It could have been humanities last, best hope for peace.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Yeah, it might be cheaper, but I'm guessing the novelty of the whole thing will get a few movies made, if one does. I would have to wonder if the US would sponsor the actor's trip to the ISS or if it would have to be sponsored by Russia or France or somewhere...
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Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
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They bitch and whine about sending a "space tourist", but they'll happily take the $ to do films rather than hard science? NASA, your hypocrisy alarm is flashing.
/.E Network?
I'm sure they would charge another good $15,000,000 per astronaut up there. Combined with training costs and the fact that you need more than several actors/one cameraman, I don't think things will be that cost effective.
What's a movie that has improved on FX weightlessness /flying since peter pan (besides Superman)?
As i read this story my fortune reads "Television is now so desperately hungry for material that it is scraping the top of the barrel. -- Gore Vidal "
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
Hasn't been done yet? Wait for it....
No, seriously, i could see some benefits from this. I can imagine that at some point in filming, it becomes more expensive to utilize the 'vomit comet'.
And, just imagine the tag line for the movie, instead of "Filmed in Smell-o-vision" you've got "Filmed in Zero-G!, when fake weightlessness caused vomiting just isn't enough!"
Yes, my girlfriend is a BitchX
As far as I know, what they tend to do these days for space scenes in films is build a set inside an aeroplane, fly up, then fly back down sharply at just the right speed so that everyone inside is briefly weightless, quickly film the scene, then do it all again - Apollo 13 must've been a nightmare. Certainly not easy, although I'm not sure many movie stars would want to go through getting up into space to film stuff either. Tough pick between the two I guess. :)
node
If its exclusively for commercial films, it sounds like a novelty that will simply be used to needlessly over-hype another failing movie.. and give NASA plenty of publicity and money in the process.
Being that Russia used to be the evil communist empire, and the US is supposedly the land of capitalism, its a bit suprising to see the Russians turn around and embrace capitalism in its space ventures.
Perhaps sometime the average citizen will be able to afford a trip to space. For now, your going to need bottomless pockets to get up there, but at least its possible.
Or you could just use the old tried and true method of bad sci-fi. Simply don't float your actors at all, ignore physics completely, and hope your audience is too stupid to notice. And if anyone does notice, make up some bullshit about "artifical gravity" and "inertia dampeners" after the fact.
NASA, I recall is up for it, but expressed the desire to hold of on more tourism for a while. Cameron agreed. (He could probably fund the damned module anyway....)
Filming The Matrix in space might have made it easier for the actors to walk all over the place on the walls and the ceiling, and do super-duper zero-gee stuffs.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Featuring elimination challenges such as "Repair the tumbling satellite," "Race to the moon," and "Decode signals from the space aliens!"
Every 10 orbits, the remaining contestants will get together and vote one of their ISS co-inhabitants jettisoned into space. In the final episode, a committee of heads-in-jars will vote on who the winner is.
This is being built by Spacehab in Russia. They will be flying there own crew, (of paid Russia Cosmonots, and soon their own real crew who work for SpaceHab), and will be renting space on their module since they own it and staff it. There's also more info at http://www.spacehab.com here
It's so unrealistic how they're hanging in mid-air.
I can see the wires, I swear.
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It will cost a bundle to send an actor up to film but you don't need a crew, (I don't think). How many actors wouldn't give up their $20 million salary in exchange for a trip into space? I know if I was ever in that position I would do it in a heart beat. Space is one of the last places where celebrity still won't get you anywhere. Money may, but not fame.
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There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
Does someone have too much money or something?
Look, if you have any trouble getting rid of it, you could just send it to me. This is just ridiculous.
"Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another" - Doctor Who
Hm..The debate seems to be the usefulness of an orbital studio. Considering leading man/leading lady salaries today, paying the soviet space agency one million dollars per head to get a director, photographer + two actors into the "studio" for a week's worth of filming is
The novelty factor is remarkably high. But don't tell me that had Ron Howard, Tom Hanks & Co. shot 30 minutes worth of capsule interiors in the studio that it WOULDN'T have added value to the film. People admire Hank's dedication to his craft when he loses 35 pounds for films like "Castaway" or "Philadelphia"; The pure accuracy of the visuals in a zero-g filmed movie with a cast like that would transcend gadget value, and fall welllllll within today's bloated A-movie budgets.
So Lou Perlman wants to put Superflous Bubblegum Band v2.0 into orbit for a live concert? To haul up 4 prettyboys + camera guy = 5.5, 6 million dollars? Ten million households pay $29 for the pay-per-view, and after it's all said and done - Hey, he still made a ton of money off pure gadget value.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Combining the space and porn genres, my money is on Jean Michel Jarre.
except it doesn't cost 40 million to get a film crew to a battleship...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You thinking a bit small aren't you. What about...
Asia Carrera in outer space!
Burn Hollywood Burn
If you read the article, you'd see that the module is a proposed attachment to the ISS, which Russia has 'handballed' to a civilian group. Russia ran out of money (again).
NASA is on record as 'reviewing the situation', as are all the other ISS partner nations. I think NASA will be objecting as strongly to this as they did to our recent Space Tourist.
Sufficient to say, it's not a NASA initiative, and NASA hasn't even made an official comment yet.
Using the holy grail of OSes...
Check out Pen (from Pen and Teller) and a dude from ZZTop they were the first to try the new commercial version of the Vomit Comet!
You get fifteen 30 second zero-G dives as well as 15 1.8g climbs! They even start you off with a 2/3g dive (Mars) and 1/3g dive (Moon)...plus it's in a freakin' cavernous jet!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
thinks Angelina Jolie looks like a crack whore. Lip implants, breast implants, and the one she needed was a brain and ass implant but got neither. The movie was POOR, save your money and download the DIVX.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Well, it is isn't it? NASA (and the space-going community at large) are trying to get the public to support the space program like it did when we were going to the moon. Personally, I'd rather see us go back to the moon, but I guess a movie would bring more (political and approval) results.
No sig for you.
At $10mil a film, that's a small enough part of the budget that many would be willing to go up and the module would pay for itself in 10 missions. This could lead other private sector companies to fund modules so that they can get some small benefit like a news desk in space, or the special NSA section, or a module holding a few bombs to let gravity do its thing. From the article, "We could have the first broadcast of music from space ... We could have TV programming or a motion picture." seems to be unambitious since that's probably not good for more than closing a channel for the evening to the Star Spangled banner or a few more overstocked movies at the Discovery Store.
The other thing to consider is that if ISS whores themselves out to doing this, that puts the Tito mission in a whole new light. And will this turn out to be another situation where the Russians decide to launch it to the station and tell the ISS partners that they can do whatever they want? Still for filming this sort of thing, consider what is more dangerous, zigzagging a place up and down for a few hours, or a 20 minute ride on the shuttle that most people would kill for to film for a week. An actor might make the investment of visiting Star City to market themselves as an actor ready for space filming or the studio would send actors off to take space lessons much as they do for other skills they want their actors to quickly get the hang of.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
There is a long article by Penn Jillette (the talking half of Penn and Teller) here. More than just an article on the technology, it talks about how it really feels far better than anything I've seen before.
Besides, it involves fat guys and pneumatic blondes stripping in zero-g along with Billy from ZZ top and a $250,000 guitar - if that doesn't appeal to nerds, I don't know what does.
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Yup that's the price of one of those ISS movie tickets (limo not included)
But there's another side to this: Zero-G effects the human body. Oh, sure, breasts will jiggle in interesting ways, but with the body-fluid shifts filling the upper body those pretty starlets will get ruddy, puffy faces and clogged sinuses.
Not a pretty thing to do to someone whos living is made by their looks.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Reading that book made me wish I'd never worked at NASA.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Outside participation... is good. Allowing studios to go to space means they'll pay through the nose to do it. And let's get some advertising on the ISS too. With extra $$$ from Coca-Cola and Nissan, the station will have more money to grow and expand. Look at what ad revenue does for auto racing.
As a former Boeing Space Station engineer, I am stunned and appalled that SpaceHab would stoop to this - leasing a module as a movie set. To get the obvious out of the way, there aren't enough scenes needing zero G in sci-fi dramas to justify it, which leaves sports and sex as the only things that would keep people's attention for continuing and repeated use. My God, we're on the verge of seeing the dawn of the 24-hour weightless smut channel, just when I thought I had seen everything...
What's even worse is that the real rationale for the Space Station is virtually dead, if it's not totally dead already. The ONLY reason for the space station is to do life science in zero G (or reduced G, like growing plants in a Martian level centrifuge) - EVERYTHING else (earth resources photography, astronomical observations, you name it) is going to be done cheaper and better from unmanned platforms that don't have the expense of an extraneous life support system.
The Space Station is SO big that the current crew of three is run ragged trying to keep the systems maintenance going - there is NO TIME for ANY life science at present. That won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle. (If modifying a hollow can of air into a movie studio costs $100M, you can imagine what a new reentry vehicle with heat shielding, comm, nav, propulsion and all the rest would cost, starting from scratch...)
When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.
Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....
I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.
Well, now those commercials for the "Wonder Anti-Gravity Bra" will look a whole lot better, not to mention the natural "face lift" :-)
This
What DVD region is space? What if I brought DVD's into space and my "international" friends watched them with me, would I be breaking any kind of law?
What kind of nerds are you people?
Think of all the the sci-fi that currently
can't be made into movies:
Integral Trees (by Larry Niven)
Ringworld (again, LN)
and pretty much anything else that takes
place in space without gravity generators!
anymore suggestions?
Most video clips of astronauts are either of them on very short stays or very long stays in space. Anywhere in between and their bodies are told to shut down and stop moving by the brain, which can't figure out what's up and what's down. Of course, the brains way of stopping the body is vomitting. You never see a man running full speed and vomitting at the same time, now you know why. Applies to sailors, too.
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
The irony is the module will be Russian. And again, as they were with the first paying space tourist, NASA is "concerned" that the new people will be in the way. Isn't it time that NASA wake up and acknowledge the commercial and tourist aspects of space and space stations?
Lets put the keyboard down for a second. Good. Now re-read the article. Its not just for zero-g effects its uses as listed in this article are for private zero gee research, educational programs, and broadcasting TV or music. How many people even know the ISS exists? This can only turn out to be a mass appeal propaganda win.
I'd like to see a lunar base in my lifetime too, but without first making attempts at privitizing space I don't see how the current NASA mentality is going to go for it.
"...My guess is that it's cheaper to float your actors with special effects than to send them up and shoot them in real zero gravity..."
:D
Yeah, but think of the great outtakes you could have at the end of a movie shot in space
It seems strange, here we are in 2001 and yet both space agencies are relying on outdated expensive technologies to carry people to space. Where's the space plane? There has been no developments in space travel technology since the 1970s. If things were as slow in computer technology, we'd all still be using PDP11s at work and AppleIIs or Commodore 64s at home.
The centrally planned economic model of Russia is changing to incorporate private enterprise into space exploration. This while the world's largest capitalistic system has NASA rejecting commercial overatures.
I never thought I would see the day when Russia was embracing capitalism more than us.
NASA would be blamed for their deaths. They were Americans, so they should have been protected by their government. Oh, the Challenger blew up killing seven true American heros, whatever. Who cares about them, NASA KILLED HARRISON FORD!!!
This would, sadly, be the end of the space program, already threatened by an ever-slimming budget, if a celebrity were to lose his or her life.
twb
-twb
This attitude that you know what's best, that you should decide what belongs in space and what doesn't. I quote you:
I am stunned and appalled that SpaceHab would stoop to this
as if there is something wrong with somebody else wanting to do something.
We'd probably have single stage to orbit, orbital hotels, cheap transport to orbit, and maybe even a start on a moon colony if it weren't for NASA's holier than thou attitude. They have blocked so much private enterprise that we ought to rename them the new communists. A bunch of damned puritans protecting their turf, better keep it expensive and to ourselves than cheap and let just anybody in.
Paaahhh!
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Infuriate left and right
Stanley Kubrick would be proud.
Actually, the original Babylon was assembled for war, although the surface excuse given was (as the UN so often does today before ravaging a place) peaceful mutual benefit. The EU, in its early days, printed and gave out a poster showing the Tower of Babylon being built by robot-looking humanoids with mottos amounting to ``we know what we want.''
But I digress. Chode wants a slice of the action!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Your going to catch a flik.
But first you need to go trhough a one year training course.(The avverage training for a mission in space is one year)
And this is fore each time you wanna se a movie.
Then comes the problem of getting there. Rocket fule aint cheep now a days. And most of us dont own one so we need to rent.
Sinse this will slow down the traffic on the "Space o'rama cinaplex" they have to raise the price. And the price is high enugh sinse this is a status thing and a product with stature is not inexpensive.
Maybe the whole thing wil just be for the people there happend to be in the naigbourhood.
At
That's one of the biggest reasons for the rapid advances in internet-related hardware and software.
Maybe that's what will jump-start a space program that's been losing momentum since July of '69.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Wasn't that good enough? I mean, really, there are people who still believe that actually happened..
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
They are using several (5 I think) Sony DVD portable players up there. They have been hacked to be region free. See here for an article on how they were modified for space flight.
-- We don't understand software, and sometimes we don't understand hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights
Soyuz has a limited lifetime on orbit.....
If the Russians found the money to resurrect Buran, would this do the job ??
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I know Private has done a porn flick on a plane which features zero gravity scenes. It was named The Uranus Experiment and they spent $750,000.
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L.
It would be a waste of time making a horror move. After all, in space noone can hear you scream.
Otherwise, this doesn't make much sense...I mean the space movies (like apollo 13) so far have been pretty damn good quality (with modern hollywood effects); aka, i don't see anyone complaining about realism. Actually, a movie made in space will probably be _less_ appealing, because of restraints in space/etc...it'll probably be harder to dish out all the mind-blowing hollywood effects everyone has come to expect in movies nowadays. This is completely ignoring the inherent safety issues. Not to mention...how you gonna fit an entire cast up there? If not, how you gonna make a movie with 2 or 3 people? Magius_AR
and it will be blown ab by saboteurs... same with babylon two and three.
babylon four will mysteriously disappear shortly after it is finished and the last one, babylon 5.... but this is another story.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
My mistake. As per the article Mars has 1/3 gravity and the moon 1/6. I shouldn't have relied on my memory...not only is it volatile, it decays faster than I wish to admit.
Thanks for the tip.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Wasn't it a short story in Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon where D.D. Harriman financed the first moon shot by getting a studio to shoot a movie on the moon?
Angelina Jolie in zero-gravity, anyone?
Noooooo! No more bouncy-bouncy-bouncy!
That's the only thing I *really* liked about Tomb Raider!
pffft..
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
Merchant Ivory kung-fu chick flicks, here we come!