TouchDesigner Slitscan 2001: A Space Odyssey Proof of Concept

I was recently watching the TIFF talk with the late great Douglas Trumbull and coincidentally happened to watch a fantastic tutorial by Noto the Talking Ball and realized that I could actually reproduce the slitscan technique used in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Oddysey.

This is actually slitscan and can continue on indefinitely. I found the original graphics used for the film online but they were extremely low resolution and pretty much unusable. I used ChatGPT to upscale and enhance the details from the artwork and painted a bit where appropriate. It’s still not quite right but it’s close enough for a day’s work.

The other thing I need to study more is how much the two sides are offset. It’s pretty finicky but I also need to go back and rework a bit of the artwork. I’m also not happy with how it first appears over the stars and I figured out how to blend multiple sources so I can get it closer I think.

I’ll be uploading a tutorial on this at some point but if you start with Noto’s tutorial, that’s where I started.

Clip of the original 1968 film for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIwvLJX-Olg

Noto’s tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iypOSV0__nk

Douglas Trumbull Slitscan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EKreQ5HD4w