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... So you're saying he made the film because he thought it would sell more of his books? I suppose you could go on a lecture tour and play the video and make some money that way. Tshirts. Signed photos. Keyrings. I don't know. ...

That's precisely why Patterson undertook the documentary film project. He promised investors (and Gimlin) a cut of the profits made from screening / distributing / licensing the planned documentary.
 
Yeah, but to go to all that hassle, making a stunning suit the likes of which even Holywood couldn't make at the time....
Not really my impression of that suit at all.

and then wear a pair of white trainers with it (or forget, somehow, to dye the soles of the feet dark). DOH!
In saying that, there's a scene in Robin of Sherwood where they all jump over a wall and you can see Ray Winstone is wearing a pair of modern boots, so it's not THAT crazy, but still...
The last episode of Game of Thrones featured an unintentional cup of Starbucks coffee, it still happens.

Analogue Boy makes a good point, and one I've seen elsewhere (perhaps in the Astonishing Legends podcast?) about the mud turning the feet light coloured.
But does it matter if the feet were light coloured? How dark should they be?
The feet look pure white, that's hardly mud. And they do look white. Of course you could say that it's an artifact of the film. But then, what else is? Normally, you'd expect the soles of the feet to be the same color as the palms. And they aren't, that's my point.

Also, they couldn't foresee the level of digital enhancements we have today, or our ability to play the movie over and over on computers and phones. The movie was shot to be shown to a paying audience, who looked at it once, in real speed.

No closely cropped slo-mo replays on a home device, that definitely wasn't around in 1967.
 
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All of the middle tones in the background are gone so there is a missing range that forces things to skew to highlights or darks.

Well, maybe. I've seen some "enhanced" versions where the color separations all but disappears in some areas,

But then - how can you claim to see all these fine muscle details if all of the colors are forced to dark?
Either the film is good enough to draw conclusions, or it isn't.

It would help to have the original - but - conveniently or not - it isn't there to be studied.
 
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It seems like the enhancement brought out the detail in the figure at the expense of the background, like the contrast was changed. Others have already mentioned the enhancements, already though.
 
In case anybody is wondering about the film itself and image quality: My best guess as to the film is that it is 16mm, not super 16mm. Regular 8mm & 16mm have two sets of prong holes to hold the film as it goes through, with the tiny middle being the exposure. Super 8mm and 16mm only have one hole on one side, which allows for more film to go to the image and reduces grain size, which in turns allows for a sharper image. I think the grain is too good for 8mm or Super 8MM, so I'm thinking regular 16 (I think we might have more detail if it were Super 16MM).
 
Well, if it's so crap why are we still debating it, having podcasts and TV shows and so on all these decades later? If it's a suit, it's an excellent one.

The Nessie Surgeon’s photo had people going for decades until it came out it was a fake.

I’ve given a couple of reasons why I think this is a suit further up the thread.
It’s an odd situation we’re in where the logical stance is being called into question in favour of a fantastical belief.
 
The Nessie Surgeon’s photo had people going for decades until it came out it was a fake.

Recall that the Surgeon's photo was surreptitiously cropped for media display. At full scale, it was not convincing and was clearly a very small thing.
 
In case anybody is wondering about the film itself and image quality: My best guess as to the film is that it is 16mm, not super 16mm. ...

Every description of the equipment I've seen said it was regular 16mm. I don't think I've ever seen any claim it was Super 16mm. It would be surprising if any such claim had been made, because the Super 16mm format wasn't invented until 1969.
 
Recall that the Surgeon's photo was surreptitiously cropped for media display. At full scale, it was not convincing and was clearly a very small thing.
I have a clear memory of reading the letter in the Telegraph in my last year at uni, late 1980's, admitting this was a hoax, but I can't find a record of it, so wonder if it's a false memory...

Mmmm...I’ve had that said to me a few times...
It's the cold weather.
 
I have a clear memory of reading the letter in the Telegraph in my last year at uni, late 1980's, admitting this was a hoax, but I can't find a record of it, so wonder if it's a false memory... ...

You may be crossing two stories about the Surgeon's photo being a hoax. The late 1980's would be after a respected photography expert concluded it was fake (but still some other wildlife specimen) in 1984 and before 1994, when the stepson of one of the co-conspirators confessed the hoax.

This from the Museum of Hoaxes site:

But a few months later, the Loch Ness monster again made headlines when a highly respected British surgeon, Colonel Robert Wilson, came forward with a picture (top) that appeared to show a sea serpent rising out of the water of the Loch.

Wilson claimed he took the photograph early in the morning on April 19, 1934, while driving along the northern shore of Loch Ness. He said he noticed something moving in the water and stopped his car to take a photo. For decades this photo was considered to be the best evidence of the existence of a sea monster in the Loch. But Wilson himself refused to have his name associated with it. Therefore it came to be known simply as "The Surgeon's Photo."

For years skeptics were sure that the photo was somehow a hoax. But no rigorous studies of the image were conducted until 1984 when Stewart Campbell analyzed the photo in a 1984 article in the British Journal of Photography. Campbell concluded that the object in the water could only have been two or three feet long, at most, and that it probably was an otter or a marine bird. He suggested it was likely that Wilson knew this to be the case.

But as it turned out, Campbell was wrong. The object in the water was not a form of marine life. It was a toy submarine outfitted with a sea-serpent head. This was revealed in 1994 when Christian Spurling, before his death at the age of 90, confessed to his involvement in a plot to create the famous Surgeon's Photo, a plot that involved both Marmaduke Wetherell and Colonel Wilson.

According to Spurling, he had been approached by Wetherell (his stepfather) who wanted him to make a convincing serpent model. Spurling did this, and this model was then photographed in Loch Ness. The picture was then given to Wilson, whose job it was to serve as a credible front-man for the hoax.

http://hoaxes.org/photo_database/image/the_surgeons_photo/
 
Well, if it's so crap why are we still debating it, having podcasts and TV shows and so on all these decades later? If it's a suit, it's an excellent one.

Rather than plough through 28 (and counting) pages of forumists posting their personal yea or nay opinions about the film, why not put it to the vote?

Do you believe the PG Film depicts:

1) A Bigfoot
2) A man in a suit
3) Unsure
 
Every description of the equipment I've seen said it was regular 16mm. I don't think I've ever seen any claim it was Super 16mm. It would be surprising if any such claim had been made, because the Super 16mm format wasn't invented until 1969.
Some few pages back, there was a post indicating that different sites claimed it was super 8 or 16, and I thought I'd weigh in. I guess I needn't have bothered.
 
Rather than plough through 28 (and counting) pages of forumists posting their personal yea or nay opinions about the film, why not put it to the vote?

Do you believe the PG Film depicts:

1) A Bigfoot
2) A man in a suit
3) Unsure

But what would a poll on this achieve? It would just point out some support for 1, 2 and 3 and would get us no further in working out fact over opinion over belief. The poll doesn’t even account for the possibility it’s a Bigfoot in a suit.
 
No...a Bigfoot would be wearing a human suit.

;)
 
Seriously?
I am on the fence about the PGF but comparing it to a grainy old black and white pic and some photos of lamp shades is a bit of a stretch surely.
Well, I am getting a bit tired of repeating myself, but I don't see anything terribly convincing about that suit. No ears, mouth or nose for starters. Plus all the other bits discussed ad nauseam here.
 
So if your theory is that it was about the money, do you know how much money they did make from the film? How could one make a lot of money out of such a thing, I'm not very business savvy?

Hey, I found an answer, finally:

DeAtley backed Patterson and formed Bigfoot Enterprises on November 1, just 10 days after the shoot, and reported $200,000 in the first year. Make no mistake about it: for the late 1960s and a man who used dig through the dump, Bigfoot was big money. Throughout the 1970s, Patty Patterson, Al DeAtley, Bob Gimlin, and a wildlife film company fought numerous lawsuits with one another over the rights to the footage. The biggest winner was a Bigfoot fan named Rene Dahinden, who ended up with about half of the rights, and Patty with the other half.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4375
 
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