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If we had actually started in close to a six-foot man and then pulled the camera back until he was a speck, we would have had to track back about two thousand feet - obviously impractical…instead we photographed him on 65mm film simply tumbling about in full frame. The we front-projected a six-inch image of this scene onto a glossy white card suspended against black velvet and, using our worm-gear arrangement, tracked the camera away from the miniature screen until the astronaut became so small in the frame that he virtually disappeared. Since we were re-photographing an extremely small image there was no grain problem and he remained sharp and clear all the way to infinity.
Stanley Kubrick, Kubrick Archives, referring to the scene in 2001 where the dead astronaut spins off into space. (in case anybody’s paying attention, my obsession with this book could go on for a while…)

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