“Powerful lights permitted high camera speeds, crucial in capturing the high-speed alchemy of surface tension, color change, and chemical reaction that [Kubrick and his collaborators] were after. The overcranked camera shooting at seventy-two frames per second produced a smoothly nuanced “galactic” slow motion as they used toothpicks to drip blobs of white paint into the ink-thinner mixture. Reacting to the banana oil, the paint sent ersatz star flows and galactic tendrils streaming into cosmic space. A macro lens made an area the size of a playing card look like a nebula light years across. Parts of what would become the film’s trippy Star Gate sequences were conjured in this way on the Upper West Side in 1965, with Kubrick himself manning the camera…”
