2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) – behind the scenes (with captions)

Note: captions only displayed for me on iPhone in portrait orientation.

I came across an old DVD copy of this movie last year and it triggered me to do a deep dive into the film. It’s been announced in the WB slate for a 4k release in 2026 as well ([DigitalBits](https://thedigitalbits.com/columns/bill-hunt/4k-release-list))

I was amazed at the sheer scope and craft of what they did to accomplish a fitting sequel to what is arguably the greatest picture of all time. Big shoes to fill, and revisiting it, I think Hyams and the visual effects team led by Richard Edlund did fantastic job.

This got me reading Cinefex again. If you’d like to know *alot* more about how this film was made, check out the [1985 Cinefex issue #20](https://archive.org/details/CineFex_1985) (Internet Archive)

The archive is just a bunch of loose files, so I did some OCR/Scans and created two main PDFs –

[Image Gallery (100+) with captions](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rqj87zejl02epkglbz2dn/2010-Image-Gallery.pdf?rlkey=7nmabuicyq1e2as21sd1mj6az&st=go5egw9a&dl=0) (dropbox)

[Main article (33,000+ words)](https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xjc40ozq1r28wkjm8iz0g/2010-Cinefex-Article.pdf?rlkey=dd76v3xejkog8vgnb7n66rebd&st=xxk06akx&dl=0) (dropbox)

Last link – [a GIF album](https://www.reddit.com/r/CineShots/s/48Fe7aO9Sz) on r/ CineShots

Mind blowing visual effects history – for example, the rotation Jupiter was produced digitally using a Cray supercomputer to simulate fluid dynamics, but there’s so much more to that statement and many others in their deep dive.

Thanks for looking, have a great day

Picture 3… 12.5 ft “miniature”