Calculus Class Ques: Was the Spiral Jump Stunt Slowed Down for the James Bond Movie?

News, notes, questions on the McHenry invented James Bond Astro Spiral Jump Stunt
MSI
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Calculus Class Ques: Was the Spiral Jump Stunt Slowed Down for the James Bond Movie?

Post by MSI »

Q: Some high school students from Morristown, New Jersey who are working on a project about calculus in James Bond movies asked the following question:
  • We heard the original stunt was slowed down in editing, do you know to what degree this was done to the final product?


A: Not sure where you heard that ‘the original stunt was slowed down in editing’?
  • And we never had checked...the flight is such a thing a beauty...guess we didn't notice!
    soooo now in response to your question we now just did a quick comparison...
A couple notes:
  • In the movie:
    • The cuts to the sheriff hollering etc showed a fake interior shot of him being tossed around
      • Bond and the sheriff obviously weren't really in the stunt car...
        • although in a court case once Ray was asked on the stand about what kind of exposure (accelerations, etc) did they experience being tossed around...holding back laughing...he had to tell them that they weren't in the car!!
        • ...the actual driver of the stunt car was legendary stunt driver Bumps Willert!
    • They added the fake train whistle to the sound which folks don’t like.
    • And possible differences in frame rate between the 16 mm handheld camera shot and the 35 mm movie shot
    • and issues related to conversion of those movies to digital and frame rate related issues...
However, EXCELLENT observation and question!
We just now did a quick check/comparison (crude but demonstrates differences!)
so the answer to your question is: YES!
Quick comparison demonstrated a 42% reduction in speed in the James Bond movie of the actual live event
see the video comparison:


The live video from a handheld camera:


With the video from the movie




Note the original stunt was designed for an AMC Javelin and the stunt in the movie appears to be a AMC Hornet
however
  • they merely put a body shell on the Javelin frame.
And another item of trivia related to 'slow down rumors':
  • Mattel was interested in adding a spiral jump as a option for their slot car race track toys.
  • Ray and I worked on the prototype of the toy in our basement in Buffalo
  • But when demonstrated the toy makers said 'too fast'!
  • in smaller scale everything happens too fast
You can't scale gravity...the inertia of a very small vehicle will make it rotate much faster than the large full scale vehicle
MSI
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Re: Calculus Class Ques: Was the Spiral Jump Stunt Slowed Down for the James Bond Movie?

Post by MSI »

Another bit of trivia related to that stunt for the movie:
  • Just now speaking with Ray he said:
    • Originally a lot of time and energy was spent by Ray with HVOSM (now known as msmac3D) redesigning the stunt for the Bond movie for a Lincoln DeTomaso Pantera...
      Lincoln de Tomaso Pantera.png
      Lincoln de Tomaso Pantera.png (91.95 KiB) Viewed 5811 times
      a much more appropriate Bond car

  • Back to the original stunt, at some point during prep for the Bond movie Lincoln dropped out of sponsorship of the movie
    • ...so they scrambled and went with the AMC Hornet??!!
MSI
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Re: Calculus Class Ques: Was the Spiral Jump Stunt Slowed Down for the James Bond Movie?

Post by MSI »

Had previously posted a mention of an excellent book here which included the origins of Calculus.
Moved to a separate topic:

See Book Review: The Clockwork Universe (Newton & Calculus!)
  • which includes the excellent quote on Calculus:
    • "The new tool for describing the moving, changing world was called calculus.
      With its discovery,
      every scientist in the world suddenly held in his hands a magical machine.
      Pose a question that asked how far?
      how fast?
      how high?
      Calculus made it easy to take a snapshot
      --to freeze the action at any given instant--
      and to then examine, at leisure, an arrow of momentary motionless...
      "
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