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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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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.
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
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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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.
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."
How many actors Lloyd's of London issurance policies would be cancelled or not allow an actor into space ?? You'd be suprised at how rescrictive they can get and the studios ENSURE the actors stay within the boundries..too much money lost if Tom Hanks looses a hand or such...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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.
Yup, it's been done... The movie was called "The Uranus Experiment", and it was released in 1999! Here's an article about it...
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
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Yup that's the price of one of those ISS movie tickets (limo not included)
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.
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
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.
Then of course, there is the space fungus.
But seriously, who wants to make a bet that one of the best selling early flicks actually shot in space would be a porn flick? There might be enough money in it to finance non governmental space flight. I guess it depends on who are the most appropriate stars.
enuf said.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Porn will undoubtedly lead the consumer charge into space. I'm sure the 'studios' will be padded and watertight (or at least spongy (ew))
People will make millions upon millions off of zero-g porn, I guarantee you.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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
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
What we really need, would be porn stars raised in Zero G environment. Just imagine: breasts untainted by the evil influence of gravity...
;)
Sorry, I know it's a bad bad bad sexist thing to say.... but it just has to be said
Kill'em! Kill'em all!
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.
And it won't necessarily be their own body fluids clogging those sinuses with eveything free floating.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If you shoot them in real zero gravity, wouldn't the blood just sort of hang in globs in mid-air, or would the pumping of the heart cause a rocket-type push as it left the body and cause the shootee to fly around like an deflating balloon?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
They would have done it years ago if we'd offered enough money.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Ya know, you're right. I totally agree that anything somebody can make work (technically and economically) in space ought to be done, and that includes everything from Spacehab modules outfitted as movie studios to the 24 hr weightless smut channel. Upon reflection (at 4 AM in my bathrobe, for God's sake), I think my visceral reaction to this story is more of a reflection on my frustrations than anything else. I WANTED the super-duper science lab and spent a good chunk of my life trying to make it happen before having to give up because the reality had changed so far away from that. Dreams die hard, and acepting that you've wasted you precious life chasing an unattainable one comes even harder. But evolution doesn't care one whit for the canon fodder that gets cast in its path, it only works and creates things more amazing and beautiful than anyone could have possible imagined. Let us all hope that is what ultimately happens with the Space Station and NASA.
Yep. But Russians finding money is almost a contradiction in terms...
Yup, it's been done... The movie was called "The Uranus Experiment"..
wow.. the only problem i'd see is that if they wanted to do some 'facials' (do i need to explain)? - wouldn't it be hard.. two reasons.. it wont have the same projectory (no gravity), and secondly, it would hit her face at the same speed it came out (no forces to slow it down).. eww.. surely dont want super man up there - that could hurt. *grin*
i guess the next thing we could see on something like star-trek is the "cum comet".. :) - please dont tell me someone has done it already.
The Uranus experiment was even nominated for a 1999 Nebula award (it didn't win, of course).
_ experiment_000516.html
More info here: http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/movies/uranus
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Open mind, insert foot.