![]() So we’re fortunate that Johnson was able to publish much of it in his two books. I imagine it must be filed away in a Raiders of the Lost Ark type of warehouse, proba bly guarded by Top Men. Ordway donated his archives to a US military and aerospace museum in Alabama, which does not make its material available to the general public. If he hadn’t done so we would have considerably less historical evidence available to us! ![]() And fortunately for posterity, Ordway squirrelled away a lot of original visual source material documenting his labours. Ordway and Harry Lange were the chief designers of most of the futuristic props and artefacts seen in the film. Johnson has published a pair of books – 2001: the Lost Science, volumes 1 and 2 – which document the work Frederick Ordway III did for the film. I refer to this image as the “4K photo” in this document. This picture, which is cropped from the scene when HAL warns Bowman of the pending AE-35 failure, is as close as the camera gets to the entire prop. In particular, there’s one brief shot of the main HAL faceplate in the centrifuge which affords the most information. It provides us with far more detail than low-rez VCR, DVD and even Blu-ray 1080p screenshots. Until recently screenshots were fuzzy and basically all we had, but the release of the Blu-ray/HD 4K scan has been invaluable. ![]() Only the brief closeup of HAL’s eye during the playback of the BBC 12 interview – “the most reliable computer ever made” – is actual moving footage! (ie: it has gate weave) Incidentally the majority of those red lens closeup shots were just still frames inserted into the film. There are closeup views of the baleful crimson lens, but those are so tightly framed you can’t see anything other than the lens itself. Unfortunately, the HAL faceplates are mostly seen at a distance throughout the film, so we don’t have detailed views of them. Stills captured from original film footage are obviously essential. Of course, to be utterly pedantic, the faceplates obviously weren’t HAL 9000 as such – that would have narratively constituted the computer’s CPU hardware, its programming, the contents of its memory, and its many interfaces – but it’s convenient to call the plates “HAL”. The idea of distributed data gathering via camera/microphone/speaker faceplates, piping data to a brain room, was quite incredible. In the 1960s people still tended to think of computers and related systems as being analogues of the human – a brain, two eyes, ears. I think it’s worth pointing out here how revolutionary such a design concept was. Each interface supposedly provided a steady stream of visual and auditory data back to the HAL brain room. Most cabins aboard the Discovery One spacecraft must have had a computer interface located on a wall somewhere, allowing the omnipresent AI to keep an eye on proceedings across the ship. From a story perspective there were obviously multiple HAL 9000 faceplates in 2001: a Space Odyssey.
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