10 Movie Special Effects Nobody Believed

5. Artificial Gravity - 2001: A Space Odyssey

The Special Effect

Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece is jam-packed with shots and sequences which still inspire awe over five decades later, perhaps most of all the jaw-dropping scene depicting Dr. Poole (Gary Lockwood) jogging in artificial gravity within the Discovery's centrifuge.

The effect was hugely complex, with the production spending $750,000 on a 27-ton rotating wheel, within which the centrifuge props were secured, and Lockwood jogged on the spot while the set was rotated around him.

As for the camera? It was mounted to the rotating set itself to give the impression of Poole's movement, and for "stationary" shots was fixed independently from the set itself.

Why Nobody Believed It

In 1968, this sort of filmmaking ingenuity was pretty much unimaginable, and given the hyper-complexity of Kubrick's production, many simply believed it to be another of the movie's mind-boggling optical effects.

Even today, message boards and subreddits are full of people asking how the effect was achieved, utterly baffled by the brain-breaking brilliance of the sequence.

It doesn't help that Kubrick was notoriously cagey about his films were made, but thankfully, over the last half-century, plenty of behind-the-scenes materials have become available.