Original Discovery from 2001
If you've already seen the 2001 pages you'll know this was a movie which completely obsessed me. For a long time I'd known that one of the earliest concepts for its main Discovery spaceship was not the graceful slender thing that eventually made it on screen, but a hulking industrial brute powered by an Orion drive. By request, Winchell Chung kindly provided me with the original concept art which I then used as a basis for the following animation. However, I wasn't insensitive to the needs of the original movie either. The incredibly clunky original look was something that in my opinion Kubrick never would have countenanced, so I slimmed things back considerably. The final result still looks very strange compared to more familiar rockets, but I'd like to think it's at least passable.
You can read about this project in much more detail on my blog. Unlike my other Orion projects, home computing power had now advanced to the stage where I could render in full HD.
Still images are below.
