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Moebius 2001 Moonbus


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1/55 is an odd scale

That's a straight function of the kit being a 1/3rd the size of the filming miniature.

but afaik, 28mm figures work out at 1/56 which is surely close enough. Guess the problem would be sourcing suitable 28mm true scale figures if you wanted a dio from the film.But there may well be some that could be converted.

The stock Moebius kit comes with figures, including one dishing out the sandwiches from the snap box.

I have started to adapt the the kit chassis pan to accept the Stargazer and Paragrafix rear tub/bulkhead combo. I need to look at the Paragrafix etched metal to see what I will be using. I also dipped for the TSDS decal sheet although I don't anticipate using all of them as quite a few are meant as replacement for the kit parts - but will be definitely using those meant for the flight deck displays.

Marty...

Edited by marty_hopkirk
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The fitting of the passenger interior to the top side of the kit pan - again is taking more time than I originally anticipated but after another evening work it will snuggle down nicely.

The interior colour of the Moonbus has garnered much debate. By common consent as well as flooding the flight deck in red light, Kubrick probably had it painted red to enhance the effect.

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Various people have tried to nail the 'true' colour of the passenger cabin, but because the set was bathed in a blue light, it has made it very difficult to pick out the true colours. A couple of guys on a website (I forget which) did try to colour correct some screengrabs but even then they did not really get too far in really resolving it.

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The padding in form, is not dissimilar from that in the Aries 1-B. But, that was a distinct mustard colour and would have shown up even with amount of blue lighting Kubrick threw at the set.

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The view below shows that the Moonbus did not have conformal glazing. It is likely the filming miniature did not have any galazing at all.

394805778.jpg

Thankfully the exterior colour is much easier to work out.

394805772.jpg

Marty...

Edited by marty_hopkirk
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John -

Thanks, a very good effort indeed. But,it's little to dark to be sure - whilst you have nailed the skin tones, I don't want to appear ungrateful (which I'm not) there is overall brown hue to the image. Look at the highlights on the suits.

Once again thanks.

Marty...

Yup, sorry about that - a combination of rushing it at work, together with an uncalibrated monitor :D. Looking at it here, I can see the brown cast... I can also see noise in the shadowed areas, which is probably more an artifact of the JPEG compression. I'll have another crack at it and see if I can fix it :).

Edit: Sorry - it's proving an intractable problem at the moment. If the midtones are adjusted to give a reasonably lifelike skin tone, the shadows gain a fair amount of red noise, and the highlights take on the brownish/reddish tinge you noticed. I could probably separate them out into luminosity layers and work on the RGB channels there, then re-combine into one image, but that would unfortunately take more time than I have today. Sorry :(. I'll see what I can come up with in the future, but in the meantime, I would guess that the seats (at least) are a dark skintone. But that would be a guess...

Edited by John Laidlaw
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Edit: Sorry - it's proving an intractable problem at the moment. If the midtones are adjusted to give a reasonably lifelike skin tone, the shadows gain a fair amount of red noise, and the highlights take on the brownish/reddish tinge you noticed. I could probably separate them out into luminosity layers and work on the RGB channels there, then re-combine into one image, but that would unfortunately take more time than I have today. Sorry :(. I'll see what I can come up with in the future, but in the meantime, I would guess that the seats (at least) are a dark skintone. But that would be a guess...

I guess this is one of the reasons why no one has got to the bottom of it. Kubrick left us with a Gordian Knot which I sure he would be proud of.

Marty...

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I guess this is one of the reasons why no one has got to the bottom of it. Kubrick left us with a Gordian Knot which I sure he would be proud of.

Marty...

I love a mystery though :). Do you have any frame grabs in a lossless format? PNG, TIFF? That would help, but if not, I'll pull apart the JPEG and see what I can do... failing that, there's a guy I know who teaches film-making at a local university who is something of a whizz at colour correction that I could talk to. And, one of his heroes is Stanley Kubrick, so I know he'd be interested. Just a thought...

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What I'm planning to do is match the on-screen colors. Given that I'll be using white light, it'll be easier to capture the look of the film that way.

Paul -

I think that is a sensible way forward and most likely what I will be doing - but it would cool to know real colours of the set.

Marty...

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Having checked all my screen caps are JPEGS.

When your friend does get a chance to look at this I will be VERY interested in the results.

I venture the only way to truly nail it will be if a colour image of the Moonbus set turns up in white light. I know there are a few in B/W, which has enormously helped with nailing the accuracy of the "internals" - but, obviously limited use for colour.

Marty...

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Here are images of the 'raw' Moonbus as it left Mastermodels, shamelessly lifted from the Mastermodels site some years ago. I did have an image of Moonbus stood up on it's end (that I can't find) showing the underneath - which goes some way to proving the accuracy of the Aurora/Moebius kit as that detail is replicated faithfully on the kit.

Note the non-conformal flight deck glazing and the lack of glazing in the passenger cabin, there is a notion that flight deck glazing got removed for filming purposes.

394873922.jpg

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Marty...

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Must admit, I always thought the Moonbus undercarriage looked out of kilter with the design - if not downright ludicrous in some respects. Now I know that their origins were as 'walking feet' I see where the design might have started.

I don't think that was the case. Remember, the above are not the MGM art department drawings, but Aurora's preliminary GA's for the kit. The drawings are dated Feb. 19. 1968, which was less than two months away from the premiere and most if not all of the filming had been wrapped by then - Kubrick would have been editing the movie at this stage - something he continued to do after the premiere, taking some 19mins of footage out. Given the way Kubrick worked it's highly unlikely that anyone at Aurora would have seen the movie at that point in time and the name Moon Walker is almost certainly an assumption on their part.

I believe in the early days of the film, there was some thought the moon bus should be a tracked vehicle.

Marty...

Edited by marty_hopkirk
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This is a b/w interior shot courtesy of Scot Alexander showing the little seen rear bulkhead of Moonbus.

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This one shows Frederick Ordway on the flight deck set of Moon Bus. Whilst not in colour it is a 'white light' shot. Note the contrast of the floor finish. There is some debate if this meant to indicate strips of velcro, or not.

394873924.jpg

Marty...

Edited by marty_hopkirk
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