Wednesday, July 31, 2019

2001: A Space Odyssey - Instructions for the Zero Gravity Space Toilet

Some of my favorite collector's items are movie paper props. I got a huge number of paper props for the Back-to-the-Future trilogy from the forums at therpf.com. Recently, I re-typed the "All work and no play..." typewriter pages from The Shining and posted these here. "2001: A Space Odyssey" movie is one of my all-time favorite movies. While it uses a lot of typesetting (which has been studied in great detail in this fantastic review), it does not contain many paper props. But there is one thing that I wanted to hang on my wall (next to my HAL 9000 replica): The instructions for the "Zero Gravity Toilet".

I created a document in legal size (8.5" x 14") in the Open Source Desktop Publishing software scribus and found fonts that closely match Eurostile Bold as described here.

I adjusted the spacing, to reproduce the spacing and the line breaks as seen in various movie images. At some point, I may build a light box, to make it exactly look as seen in the movie. Currently, I have it in a simple black frame.


In case somebody prefers to use less ink/toner, I also made a black-on-white version.
To get the full quality, click on the images, then right-click on the new image, and select "open image in new window" - there you right-click: "save image as".

PS: I just figured out that this does not give you the full quality, so I uploaded the hi-res .pdf file on my Google Drive.





4 comments:

mike said...

This looks great and the best recreation I've found online. But 971x1600 pixels is far too low to print nicely at any decent size. Printed at 300dpi, 1600 pixels will come out about 5 inches tall. Would you be able to post the Scribus file?

Markus said...

You are right about the quality - I was not aware that Google is reducing the quality for downloads. Or maybe they changed it after I tried it (because I really remember testing this). In any case, I just added the link to the hi-res .pdf file on my Google Drive. This should work (or please let me know if not).

mike said...

The PDF looks great, thank you!

Markus said...

I'm glad I could help!