The 0xberry animation stand equipped with a 65mm Mitchell camera was used for shooting backgrounds of stars, Earth, Jupiter, the Moon, as well as for rotascoping and shooting high contrast mattes. All stars shot on the animation stand were spatter-airbrushed onto glossy black paper backing and were shot at field sizes of from six to twenty-four inches wide. Extensive tests were made to find the optimum star speed for each shot and great care was taken to control the action so that the stars wouldn't strobe. In almost all shots it was necessary for the stars to be duped, but this became a simpler problem because they required only one record instead of the usual three YCM's.

Backgrounds of the Earth, Jupiter, Jupiter's moons, and others were back-lit Ektachrome transparencies ranging in size from 35mm to eight by ten inches, and these were shot from much larger painted artwork. The Moon was a series of actual astronomical glass plates produced by the Lick Observatory. These plates were used only after nearly a year of effort at the studio to build a moon model - several attempts, in fact, by different artists, and all were unsuccessful.

It may be noted that in only a few effects shots in space does one object overlap another. The reason for this is that normal matting techniques were either difficult or impossible to use. The rigging to suspend the models was so bulky and complex that the use of the blue screen technique would have been very awkward. Also, the blue screen would have tended to reflect fill light into the subtle shadow side of the white models. It became a monumental task merely to matte the spacecraft over the stars, and the final solution to this was meticulously rotascoped, hand-painted mattes.

As for rendering on a Cray - the first Cray was built 8 years after 2001 was filmed.