Is anyone here a member of Concen? There is no way to join on the website that I can see:

Concen.org

I have never seen a registration button after repeated visits over a couple of years. When I web search I do see some old mentions on reddit of them having open sign-ups. Do you have to get an invite or what?

These are written by Leonid Konovalov, a Russian cinematographer and Film School Professor in Moscow, who regularly writes articles detailing how various aspects of the NASA's Gemini and Apollo mission's visual documentation were likely achieved with standard and sometimes cutting edge (for the time) Hollywood special effects.

The footage in question in this series is the infamous "take-off" of the LEM from the surface of the moon during Apollo 17, which we are told was "broadcast in living color!" back to earth via a satellite and TV camera mounted on the abandoned Lunar Rover. The camera was placed in position by the Astronots and controlled from Houston with masterful predictive skill since it faithfully pans upwards to follow the LEM's assent despite the delay in transmission to and from the surface of the moon.

I say the footage is infamous because it has long been the subject of some derision as possibly the fakest looking aspect of the live action footage. However saying it's fake looking gives no insight as to how it was done, with NASA defenders as usual saying such footage would be impossible to fake back then. In fact it could have been faked with standard analogue effets in use for decades prior in Movie Production:

184. To take off from the moon, NASA used a Christmas cracker instead of an engine

185. Apollo 17 did not take off from the moon, but fell down from the ceiling of the decoration

186. A Detective investigates the rise of Apollo 17 from the moon

187. Apollo-17 astronauts could not enter the lunar module - it was a waist-high scale model

188. Still: Apollo 17 was it full size or a 10-1 scale model?

The QRD: The LEM is a scale model in the entire footage. The Astronots only pass in front of it when they can dominate the frame of the footage, ie. when they are right in front of the lens. They are careful not to pass in front of the LEM further away from the lens as this would give away the reduced size of the LEM. When approaching the LEM for takeoff, they take a large hooked flank approach, for seemingly no reason, instead of walking directly, despite time constraints of Oxygen supply. This is to avoid walking in front of the cameras cone of vision of the LEM. If they did walk in front it would be seen that they are in fact talller than it.

The Entrance to the LEM is (conveniently) directly behind the cameras focus point, ensuring the the astronots ingress is completely hidden from view. This is due to the in-camera trickery - they are in reality not just behind the full size LEM but many many meters behind a scale model lem - it's an elaborate forced-perspective technique, detailed in the articles.

The take-off then, after a convenient panning of the camera to admire an earth painted on the ceiling of the studio and a break in transmission, is achieved by filming the scale model, now upside down on an inverted "moon surface", with a "Christmas cracker" explosion and butane flame blasting the model down a wire, upside down, towards the ground. The effect would have been filmed on high speed camera, so in real time was very brief, and then was slowed down for the "live" footage.

See the articles for the details. It's really quite ingenious, despite it still looking quite fake to those skeptical. The same exact style of in-camera, forced perspective trickery is used in modern films. The most recent example I can think of being the Lord of the Rings films, when they showed the Hobbit being much smaller than Gandalf despite them being about the same height.