Color the Moon

I am going to go ahead and apologize for ranting about complete lunacy disguised as documentary film making. At the very best, this movie could be considered stealth comedy.

 "once I started the colorizing process on the photos by adding earth tones and colors to the moon landscapes, the structures and towers began to pop out! I was so overwhelmed at what I was seeing that I stayed up all night to colorize as many of the photos from the archives as I could. I have spent as much as two days colorizing a single photo because there are so many things there to see."

- - Jose Escamilla

I was alone in my dungeon at work today, so I decided to do something different. A facebook friend liked and commented on some organization's posting of a documentary called Moon Rising by Jose Escamilla. Internet commenters were getting into a heated debate about it, so I let it play in the background while I responded to emails and worked on some spreadsheets.

If you already clicked on that link, let me save you the hassle of actually watching it. This guy wanted to use a color picture of the Moon for his documentary about Moon conspiracies, but all of them are black and white! So in order to make a cool cover image, he looked at aerial pictures of fields on Earth to figure out how he should realistically color the Moon. Then he "airbrushed" some photos in Photoshop, and holy crap! It looks totally different! There are features that look like blurry alien structures and saucers hovering over the brown and orange surface! And you sheeple thought those were craters. Don't pay attention to the photographs shown throughout the documentary featuring astronauts' gold tinted visors or red white and blue flag patches.

Just to get this straight, he is editing images he claims have already been heavily edited to restore them to his version of how they originally looked, thus proving they have been tampered with. If you can follow the previous sentence, I hope you can laugh at it.

If you will indulge me, I would like to tell you about some more ridiculous claims. Of course you will.

Jose did a wonderful job demonstrating his complete lack of photographic knowledge, despite his claims to being a film maker. He complains that the skies in the photos from the surface of the moon are completely black, even though they are all the way up in space! To illustrate this (using a color photo he already claimed didn't exist) he screws around with the sky to show off the JPEG artifacts as obvious gigantic structures that would have to be hundreds of feet tall. Too bad for him the sunlight on the Moon, direct and unhindered by a pesky atmosphere, would be so bright that the shutter speeds would be far too fast for stars trillions of miles away to show up on film.

In this same vein, Jose complains that the grid lines present on many of the photographs (Apparently the entire reason for using Hasselblads. It certainly wasn't the fact that they are impeccably crafted, finely tuned machines) aren't visible in that black sky he complains about. Further proof they photoshopped the sky out! No way, Escamilla, if there ain't enough light for the stars to show up on the film, there's not enough light to cast that little X's shadow onto it either. Although this kind of redaction wouldn't allow for the previous one to show up.

I'm not even going to tell you how long the film spends on the vast conspiracy between all space agencies to include a vector type symbol on their agency logos and mission patches telling inquiring minds, "We know something you don't know! We think all you sheeple are so stupid we're going to put it right out in the open for all of you to find! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"

Asking questions and keeping yourself open to new ideas is important, but for the sake of all the gullible people out there, look through a telescope before you claim the moon is blue and brown and orange with massive alien structures.