The Dawn Of Man sequences at the beginning of the film were all shot at Shepperton Studios apart from the skull-smashing scene which was shot in a field near the studio. These colour transparencies were shot in South West Africa and ten such shots were used as the landscape backdrop for the opening scenes. The back drop was created by projecting the transparencies using a process called front projection using a mirror to reflect the background onto a reflective screen and the actors themselves.

2001 opens in the barren landscape of a prehistoric Earth populated by apes and other wild animals. It is here that the black monolith appears, which then re-appears three million years later on the moon. The spaceship 'Discovery' is despatched on a nine month voyage to find the source of the electronic signals emitted by the monolith. It is the final sequence in this prologue, when an ape throws a bone high into the air, and in an instant we are transported three million years into the future, this is one of the most discussed sequences in the film.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were the years of the 'space race' between the Soviet Union and the U.S. It is against this backdrop that Stanley Kubrick conceived 2001: A Space Odyssey and with the science-fiction writer Arthur C.Clarke, devised a screenplay based in part on an early short story by Clarke, The Sentinel, 1948, set in 1996, about the discovery of an alien artefact on the moon. According to Clarke, Kubrick's vision for this film was to be about ...Man's relation to the universe...a work of art which would arouse the emotions of wonder, awe - even, if appropriate, terror.