"Robert A. Heinlein - Shooting Destination Moon (Article)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

So the suits are hastily looped up with black thread into a satisfactory
тАЬfloatingтАЭ appearance, and we start over. - -
Such details are ordinarily the business of the script girl who can always be
depended on to see to it that a burning cigarette laid down on Monday the
third will be exactly the same length when it is picked up on Wednesday the
nineteenth. But it is too much to expect a script
тАв girl to be a space flight expert. However, by the end of the picture, our
script clerk, Cora Palmatier, could pick flaws in the most carefully
constructed space yarn. In fact, everybody got into the -act and many
flaws were corrected not because I spotted them but through the alertness
and helpfulness of others of the hundred-odd persons it takes to shoot a
scene. Realism is compounded of minor details, most of them easy to
handle if noticed. For example, we used a very simple dodge to simulate a
Geiger counterтАФwe used a real one.
A mass of background work went into the flight of the spaceship Luna which
appears only indirectly on the screen. Save for the atomic-powered jet, a
point which had to be assumed, the rest of the ship and its flight were
planned as if the trip actually were to have been made. The mass ratio was
correct for the assumed thrust and for what the ship was expected to do. The
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jet speed was consistent with the mass ratio. The trajectory times and
distances were all carefully-plotted, so that it was possi- ble to refer to charts
and tell just what angle the Earth or the Moon would subtend to the camera
at any given instant in the story. This was based on a precise orbitтАФ
calculated, not by me, but by your old friend, Dr. Robert S. Richardson of
Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain. -


None of these calculations appears on the screen but the results do. The
Luna took off from Lucerne Valley in California on June 20th at ten minutes to
four, zone eight time, with a half Moon overhead and the Sun just below the
eastern horizon. It blasted for three minutes and fifty secOnds and cut off at
an altitude of eight hundred seven miles, at escape speed in a forty-six-hour
тАв orbit. Few of these data are given the audienceтАФbut what the audience
sees out the ports is consistent with
the above. The time at which they pass the speed of sound, the time at which
they burst up into sunlight, the Bonestell backdrops of Los Ang├зles County
and of the western part of the United States, all these things match up. Later,
- in the approach to the Moon, the same care was used.
Since despite all wishful thinking we are still back on Las Pahmas Avenue,
much of the effect of taking off from Earth, hurtling through space and landing
on the Moon had to be done in miniature. George Pal was known for his
тАЬPuppetoonsтАЭ before he started producing feature pictures; his staff is
unquestionably the most skilled in the world in producing three-dimensional
animation. John Abbott, director of animation, ate, slept, and dreamed the
Moon for months to accomplish the few bits of animation necessary to 1111
the gaps in the live action. AbbottтАЩs work is successful dnly when it isnтАЩt
noticed. IтАЩll warrant that you wonтАЩt notice it, save by logical deduction, i.e.,
since no One has been to the Moon as yet, the shots showing the approach
for landing on the Moon must be animationтАФand they are. Again, in the early