Help identifying hoax footage

[Chew]

Does anybody recognize where the footage starting at 5:01 is from? Stuart Robbins was asked during an interview he gave recently. To me it looks like a broadcast news simulation or a documentary.

Stuart describes the origin of the footage here: https://www.facebook.com/ExposingPseudoAstronomy/posts/572888716128906?stream_ref=5

[darren r]

To me, it looks like two models suspended against a static background, and it's the camera that is moving, with added jerkiness and graininess. A museum display maybe? Wherever it's from, the suggestion in the video that it's any way genuine is ridiculous. Why would NASA send another, secret, spacecraft to shoot footage they couldn't possibly show and that would be of no practical use to them?

[ka9q]

The usual giveaway in cheap model photography is the small depth of field. Before CGI became the norm, model animation studios had to use oversize models, long exposures and extremely bright lighting to get an adequate depth of field. There are stories about the guys who animated the Enterprise flybys in the original Star Trek opening having to work stripped to the waist because it was so hot in the studio. I suspect George Lucas had his own problems in the Death Star battle sequences in his first movie.

I suppose sticking to rigorous physics wouldn't have been very exciting. Not only is there no noise in space, but it's pretty dark in interstellar space so you wouldn't see anything either -- maybe just a black silhouette in front of the stars...

[Daggerstab]

Better link: (YouTube allows making links to timestamps.)

I don't think it's models. (Practical special effects seem to be going out of vogue these days.) To me, it looks like one of those pseudo-3D things when they take a photograph and split it into different layers with different parallax. Though in this case it's a composite of three images - the LM, the CSM and the background. Notice how they don't change attitude. It looks like the kind of thing The Faking Hoaxer likes to do with Adobe After Effects and similar software.

So to identify the "footage" you just need to identify the original photos.

ETA: By the way, what's the original context of the video? It looks like some kind of TV show to me, with people in a studio. "Guess If It's Fake"?

[AtomicDog]

Please, please tell me that this mess wasn't represented as genuine space footage.

[raven]

Gerry Anderson would have been ashamed to make something that bad. Heck, the simulations made to cover the audio, like CBS had made, look better than this.

[smartcooky]

I suspect George Lucas had his own problems in the Death Star battle sequences in his first movie.

They were filmed in a van Nuys car park



     


More here

http://www.starwarslocations.com/mediagallery

[ka9q]

Thanks, I didn't know he filmed these outdoors. That would solve both the lighting and the space cooling problem.

Of course, I've always wondered where the light comes from when we see spaceships lit up in interstellar space...

[Kiwi]

Does anybody recognize where the footage starting at 5:01 is from? Stuart Robbins was asked during an interview he gave recently. To me it looks like a broadcast news simulation or a documentary.

In the second link
https://www.facebook.com/ExposingPseudoAstronomy/posts/572888716128906?stream_ref=5
it's claimed that the film is of Apollo 14 and that the craft are docking.  It couldn't be film of any Apollo spacecraft because none of them orbited the moon at right angles to the sunlight, as shown in this film. The shadow on the LM (which is lit from directly behind) doesn't match the light on the "moonscape" below, which appears to come from roughly the left.

Nor is it a docking scene because the descent stage wouldn't be there, and the top of the LM would be facing the CM, so we'd be looking up the nozzle of the ascent stage.  Also the craters don't look much like any real craters from orbital height either.

Either an outright fake or a very poor simulation for illustrative purposes.

[Daggerstab]

After some not-so-thorough looking through the Apollo Image Atlas, I have a few candidates from the source of the CSM image: anything from AS16-113-18290 to AS16-113-18293.

There are too much candidates for the LM image, and the quality of the YouTube video and the images in the AIA makes comparisons difficult. I used the Atlas because it is somewhat easier to navigate than the other Apollo galleries I know.

ETA: Look at the front leg of the LM. There is a ladder there, yet it looks like a solid block. It looks like someone forgot to "clean" the space between the rungs when they were cutting out the LM from the original image.

Wikipedia has a name for the effect I described in my previous post: parallax scrolling, though it seems that the term is used in the context of computer game graphics. Look at the animated example here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scrolling#Example

And the "shaky camera" effect is really easy to produce nowadays.

[Daggerstab]

Links to the CSM images:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a16/AS16-113-18290.jpg
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a16/AS16-113-18291.jpg
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a16/AS16-113-18292.jpg
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a16/AS16-113-18293.jpg

These are the "standard" resolution versions. To get the "high resolution", add "HR" to the filename.

And I think I got the LM image too: it seems to be a brightened, rotated version of this one, or a picture in the same series:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a16/AS16-118-18897.jpg

Though I'm not sure how much additional manipulation it has undergone - putting it in an image manipulation program, I couldn't bring out the surface probes on the legs.

Of course, it's possible that the original image is a frame from a film, or a 3D rendering, or something else, in which case... good luck finding it.

[Daggerstab]

Any idea what happened with this? I mean the Japanese show for which Robbins was interviewed. It should have aired by now.

[Chew]

The link to Stuart's FB thread is in the OP. You can ask Stuart directly.