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Moon

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Re: Moon

#81

Post by agumonkey »

Pxtl wrote: post #73

I notice a recurring theme of '80s retro-futurism in Moon. It all looks like the way we imagined the future at the peak of the Space Shuttle, but with little nods to modern technology to avoid obvious anachronisms. Brilliant design. For example, the black-backgrounded GUIs with wide text on them remind me of old DOS-era applications, but they're displayed on modern high-resolution flat-panel displays. The T-shirt is…

Something that I wish would hit Lucas mind before he made the SW prequels, it's contravariant on the imaginary basis of space.

Re: Moon

#82

Post by icambron »

grey-area wrote: post #41
icambron wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Even without plot twists, a movie is often a process of discovery. You explore the character, narration, allusions, themes, and language in the order they're shown in the film. And Moon in particular is such a carefully paced movie. So while I agree that the plot spoilers may not matter much in this case, I think you'd have a much different and likely inferior experience watching Moon after reading this b…

If you do consistently find things spoiled by foreknowledge, there is a simple solution - just avoid reading articles or discussions which mention the film before you see it (stop reading at the word Moon!), no need to call out spoilers because every meaningful discussion of this film will be a spoiler in some sense, and many people enjoy discussing films and books online after or before they see them. I'm not sure w…

I don't really understand. There are plenty of examples of work that discuss films without spoilers. Professional reviewers, especially, excel at this because they are explicitly aware of what parts of the movie will be fascinating to discover. And so your idea that everyone should cover their ears and run for the hills when they hear the word Moon would prevent them from finding out whether, say, they might want to watch it in the first place.

But regardless, you're missing the point. No one is complaining about the article containing spoilers or are trying to shut down the discussion; I think you must be reading too much connotation into the term "spoiler". What we're doing is providing the advice that people haven't seen the movie may wish to do so first, because it may be a lot more fun (I understand you may disagree, which is fine, but I stand by the advice). Your diatribe against "the cult of no-spoilers" is simply misplaced.

Re: Moon

#83

Post by dave_addey »

Pxtl wrote: post #73

I notice a recurring theme of '80s retro-futurism in Moon. It all looks like the way we imagined the future at the peak of the Space Shuttle, but with little nods to modern technology to avoid obvious anachronisms. Brilliant design. For example, the black-backgrounded GUIs with wide text on them remind me of old DOS-era applications, but they're displayed on modern high-resolution flat-panel displays. The T-shirt is…

Very interesting! My follow-up post to Moon is actually Alien, and I've come to a similar realization. I reckon the main reason that 2001: A Space Odyssey hasn't aged half as much as Alien, or Silent Running, or other 70s/80s sci-fi, is that in 2001, all of the monitors are flat-screen displays, not curved CRTs. Ironically, this is only because they didn't have the computing power to generate the HAL graphics on an actual computer, and so it was all hand-animated on film and then back-projected onto a flat display. This combination of flatness and high-resolution animation means that it looks just like the retina displays of today.

Re: Moon

#84

Post by grey-area »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #80
grey-area wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do consistently find things spoiled by foreknowledge, there is a simple solution - just avoid reading articles or discussions which mention the film before you see it (stop reading at the word Moon!), no need to call out spoilers because every meaningful discussion of this film will be a spoiler in some sense, and many people enjoy discussing films and books online after or before they see them. I'm not sure w…

> It's interesting, because I find more pleasure sometimes in rereading a book or watching a film again than the first time [...] So I'd say go ahead and enjoy reading about things beforehand, you may well find it actually improves the experience That's lovely for you. You are not me. You are basically doing this: me: "I don't like artichokes." you: "Oh, that can't be true! You must never have actually eaten artichok…

This is exactly how I feel about people crying spoilers, because it ruins reviews or discussions of films and leads to people tip-toeing around discussions because they can't just discuss the details of the film without lots of hedging and caveats, and even then there's always someone who will say 'oh this ruins it for me, I need to see the film first before anyone discusses it on the internet you should have hidden your thoughts behind a spoiler warning or not written them at all'. I see this comment all the time on professional reviews of films, which are intended to discuss the film.

I wouldn't 'stuff artichokes down your throat' as you put it and didn't properly discuss the film here because of the spoiler warning, but I don't want to be policed by other people in what I can say about a film, which is exactly what talking about spoilers does - it shuts down discussion and damages the discussion of everyone else.

If you don't want to read about a film before you see it, don't do that then, but don't attempt to police the thoughts of everyone else.

It's clearly an emotive topic, and I'm sad now this has taken over the top of the discussion of this film and don't think any of these comments including the OP deserve to be anywhere near the top (they were not when this thread started), so will leave it there.

Re: Moon

#85

Post by Pxtl »

dave_addey wrote: post #83
Pxtl wrote: post #73

I notice a recurring theme of '80s retro-futurism in Moon. It all looks like the way we imagined the future at the peak of the Space Shuttle, but with little nods to modern technology to avoid obvious anachronisms. Brilliant design. For example, the black-backgrounded GUIs with wide text on them remind me of old DOS-era applications, but they're displayed on modern high-resolution flat-panel displays. The T-shirt is…

Very interesting! My follow-up post to Moon is actually Alien , and I've come to a similar realization. I reckon the main reason that 2001: A Space Odyssey hasn't aged half as much as Alien , or Silent Running , or other 70s/80s sci-fi, is that in 2001 , all of the monitors are flat-screen displays, not curved CRTs. Ironically, this is only because they didn't have the computing power to generate the HAL graphics on…

It's worth contrasting against contemporary SF films that don't stylistically tie themselves to the past - look at Sunshine with its touchscreens, or Children of Men with the hyperflat TVs, or minority report with the gesture-driven holograms.

Re: Moon

#86

Post by sroerick »

dmazin wrote: post #19

Something I excitedly noticed I've never been able to tell anyone because it's too specific: Moon (2009) opens with the line "Where Are We Now?," the title of the first single off Bowie's new album (2013). David Bowie is, of course, Duncan Jones' father.

David Bowie is also named after Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which heavily influenced Moon.

Re: Moon

#87

Post by bherms »

ChuckFrank wrote: post #3

Simply astounding. Wonderfully done. The wealth of typographical research into various movies is almost Limitless. Twelve Monkeys couldn't pull me away from this. Regardless of what Her's got to say about it.

Gene?

Re: Moon

#88

Post by lcrs »

_mulder_ wrote: post #62
CoffeeDregs wrote: post #18

Before this post, I was thinking about watching Moon again. It's such an incredible and unknown film. I will watch it again. If you haven't seen Moon, then the following song will not make sense, but the sense of desolation and uncertainty rhymes with the film. The ending of the song captures the denouement @ 7:20. http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Downfall/2VQtYZ Moon was fantastic.

Clint Mansell's original soundtrack is absolutely fantastic. I read they managed to get him involved in the film because it was during the writers strike 07-08 (remember that?!) and Hollywood had ground to a halt, hence Mansell and ilk were looking for projects to keep them active. I like your song, but it's a different vibe. To my ear, it sounds a bit too military to be Moon. I do like the vintage synth sounds thoug…

I remember hearing at the time that the reason they were able to build such a big set for the moon base was because the stages were mostly empty, also due to the writers' strike.

Re: Moon

#89

Post by lcrs »

I worked on the post-production of Moon, particularly the titles and the screens in the base and Gerty's face. Pretty humbling to have someone pay so much attention to what we did!

It's funny to hear about the Microstile/Eurostile differences - when we had to replace type that was on the real set we made new elements using Eurostile, so there are probably some inconsistencies.

The Bank Gothic/gradient fill/outline choice definitely haunted us for a while after - it was already a bit of a scifi poster trope but it's got out of control since. I've cringed a few times seeing posters on the tube and wished we'd picked something slightly different. I remember being keen on an outlandish faux-Cyrillic face at the time but it wasn't legible enough. I did win the argument about colour though - my boss at the time did a bunch of concept frames with translucent orange type for the main credit lines... there's a little interview with him here: http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/moon/

Maybe it's too obvious to bear mentioning but there's a big foreshadowing in the shot where Sam Rockwell's credit appears - a second copy of his name dissolves up out of focus further back inside the base...

The OCR-1A type was set by me, in a slight hurry as I recall, type-on effect and all. It had to look different to the Bank Gothic credit lines, and I'm sure we tried the obvious Eurostile and it wasn't readable or was too heavy for that amount of text. It feels a bit of a case of too many faces in succession, in retrospect. I love machine-specific typefaces. I think I first got into them after reading The Computer Contradictionary, which mentions E13B a couple of times, the type used for the numbers printed in magnetic ink on cheques: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognit.... That book is worth a look if you appreciate a bit of cynical tech humour... http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tZKCZje8178C&printsec=fro...

The dot-matrix background on the text fields of the "big board" with the countdown on it was probably my bad also... we replaced that whole board wherever it appears in the film because the real prop had light leaking into the four harvester status lines and you could see they were acetate. We definitely tried having the letters formed by the actual dots but they weren't legible enough, and making the dots smaller made them not legible enough. Sense of nerd embarrassment. I guess it's some kind of future display technology with... big dots? Err...

Trivia: the postcard reading "wish you were here" was inserted in post because we had to cover up the real one which couldn't have its rights cleared ;)

More trivia: there was a spelling mistake on one of the panels on set, the one which says "satellite uplink" when Matt Berry is yelling at Gerty. It was caught by QC and I have some memory of fixing it for that shot since we'd inserted the video into that screen anyway, but it might be visible in other shots. It had "satellite" spelled "satelite".

Looking forward to more from that blog. I've thought of starting something similarly one-track, favourites being "over-obvious ND grad filters in film" or "non-circular lens vignettes done badly in post through the ages" or "10 worst skies graded without highlight rolloff" ^_^

Re: Moon

#90

Post by dave_addey »

lcrs wrote: post #89

I worked on the post-production of Moon, particularly the titles and the screens in the base and Gerty's face. Pretty humbling to have someone pay so much attention to what we did! It's funny to hear about the Microstile/Eurostile differences - when we had to replace type that was on the real set we made new elements using Eurostile, so there are probably some inconsistencies. The Bank Gothic/gradient fill/outline ch…

Wow – that's some cracking trivia! I spotted (but chose to ignore) the ‘satellite’ typo – I think it's actually ‘sattelite’ when it appears on screen.

Please do post this as a comment to the original blog post as well – I'd love for people to be able to read it after they've finished reading my article. And thanks for the kind words about the blog – there's plenty more where that came from :)

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