Space Shuttle 10... 9... 8...
This project goes way back to the beginning of the Space Shuttle's origins. Rockwell commissioned Metavision to create scenes showing Shuttle activities before the first launch.
Metavision convinced them that the flat animations so common to that era just wouldn't do! But the new special effect technologies seen in Star Wars and Battlestar Gallactica could be adapted to portraying REAL spaceships as well as the science fiction variety.
Metavision created eight iconographic photo realistic motion-control animated scenes showing the Space Shuttle from vantage points that couldn't be duplicated in real life;
Rockwell put the scenes in the public domain and BILLIONS of viewers have seen the result. You've probably seen them many times. ABC News used the scene shown above as their signature for two years.
Some scenes are still used by news services and television shows all over the world to this day.
The night before John Glen's return to space, NBC Nightly News used the scenes as a poetic counterpoint during a Tom Brokaw interview with Walter Cronkite.
