I had actually considered a graveyard; Googling Japanese cemetary or graveyard gives many images of cemetaries that are clearly made to resemble small cities, although I don't have any idea if this is common. If it is a graveyard designed to resemble a city it could explain why some see buildings in the image, but I don't think this is a city-style graveyard even if it is a graveyard.

Although I'm pretty sure Christianity is very uncommon in Japan, and it would be unlikely to see so many crosses in a Japanese cemetary.

Well, while we're drawing on the image, I'll throw together another possibility I see and post it.

edit: Well, here ae several things I see in the image. I'm not sure if any of them are right, nor whether they all go together. Some of them seem like the object I see by themself but don't fit the surroundings, like the hand (where the heck would it be coming from?)



IMO, the simplest, fastest, and best way to find out what this is will be to post it on 4chan every few days until someone there guesses what it is. I've solved complicated questions I couldn't figure out through Google in minutes using 4chan :P

At some point, some of these filtered images need to be added to the Wiki article (in addition to the originals, of course, not in place of them.)

I've been playing around with these a bit as well, and unfortunately it seems that the shot must have been completely redone because there's no way to get all the lines of the DC to overlap the OA Reis. Even working with one Rei at a time and masking the rest out doesn't work cleanly... it's like everything is slightly warped, or perhaps redrawn from a tracing?

Regardless, it's way too much work for what it's worth, and it's entirely likely we still wouldn't know what the hell this is even if all the Reis were gone.

NemZ wrote:I've been playing around with these a bit as well, and unfortunately it seems that the shot must have been completely redone because there's no way to get all the lines of the DC to overlap the OA Reis. Even working with one Rei at a time and masking the rest out doesn't work cleanly... it's like everything is slightly warped, or perhaps redrawn from a tracing

I don't think you want to match it up with OA, but with the director's cut from Platinum. That cut is identical except the overlays have been removed.

I was using the files in the 'library' link provided earlier, wherever they came from.

The whole scene was reanimated in the DC version; more than just adding nipples to the Rei-tachi. Back when I tried this, I used frames from just before or after the overlay appeared, as the best guess at the background then available.

The main thing that strikes me about that image we're baffled on, is that the more it got extracted from the Reiquarium, the less I can see a consistent sense of perspective in it.

I've been playing around with these a bit as well, and unfortunately it seems that the shot must have been completely redone because there's no way to get all the lines of the DC to overlap the OA Reis. Even working with one Rei at a time and masking the rest out doesn't work cleanly... it's like everything is slightly warped, or perhaps redrawn from a tracing?

I brought this up already :P .There is a rippling water effect on the version with the image overlays EDIT: Although looking at the clip again the ripple only seems to effect the overlays and not the Reis. I'm not sure why the JPEGs on the wiki have distortion and shearing on the Reis. Regardless, by rotating and scaling and moving one of the clips I was able to get it to line up almost perfectly with the other, to the point I was able to make the filtered version of the entire clip.

There's also the added complication that the reis are in layers moving at different speeds so pulling comparison slides from elsewhere in the same reel creates as many new problems as it solves. Oh, and there's a soft gradient overlay that stays with the camera going from the diagonal corners, so pasting together different shots to fill the screen ends up with obvious color matching problems.

Basically while I probably could remove all the reis from the picture if I was willing to spend several hours with it, by the time I got done it wouldn't be so much a cleaned up image as a new matte painting based on the original, and thus probably still completely useless for figuring out what was is really in the dang photo to start with.

Did you see the two clips I posted with the entire video filtered? If you want, I can grab the same frame from from both versions of the shot, as I did with the latest version of the mystery image. They still don't line up perfectly but it eliminates the parallax problem as best as can be done.

Oh fine, I'll give it a little more time if you send that my way. I didn't think to rotate it though... must not be much of an angle for individual parts to still line up really well while everything else is a bit off.

Come on guys
You can do this
The mystery can't win to you

I originally rotated it one tenth of a degree but for this version I ended up using corner pin to distort it slightly.

Here are two correspoinding frames already roughly lined up: http://imageshack.us/g/171/rno.png/

This is based on the last version that was posted:



>cropped the unfiltered edges away
>used healing brush to erase the reiquarium (probably a little still there)
>applied a light gradient overlay to even out the tones a bit
>fine-tunned highlight/shade levels to bring out the contrast

...still looks like a campfire surrounded by rocks to me.

...I'm still seeing a graveyard. Where's the fire?

okay, more like a campfire that isn't lit yet, just a pile of wood waiting to be lit up.

The other thought i had is that the bottom right is a cleat on a ship with some sort of rigging tied to it, the rest is broken ice, maybe with a sub rising in the middle? Grasping at straws here.

NemZ wrote:This is based on the last version that was posted:



>cropped the unfiltered edges away
>used healing brush to erase the reiquarium (probably a little still there)
>applied a light gradient overlay to even out the tones a bit
>fine-tunned highlight/shade levels to bring out the contrast

...still looks like a campfire surrounded by rocks to me.

Excellent! This looks more and more like an excavation. The "kneeling man" now looks like a giant head and shoulders. On the middle left I see people who are dwarfed by the head (perhaps a couple of people on the right too). There's some sort of excavation equipment in the middle. The stuff at the top looks like support buildings or perhaps more equipment.

thewayneiac wrote:Excellent! This looks more and more like an excavation. The "kneeling man" now looks like a giant head and shoulders. On the middle left I see people who are dwarfed by the head (perhaps a couple of people on the right too). There's some sort of excavation equipment in the middle. The stuff at the top looks like support buildings or perhaps more equipment.

So are we looking at the excavation of Adam the 1st or second time? Or perhaps for the lance?

And does it appear to anyone else that these images were going chronologically? If so, that could help provide context.

NemZ wrote:

The dark area in the middle now looks like there are boxes irregularly arranged on a dark surface rather than being a heap of stuff; but it doesn't gel in perspective with the trees+obelisk+length of curtain wall in the top left quadrant; and neither with the phone booth and cabin in the top right.

something else i noticed... the 'seat' doesn't exist.. it's just a shadowed area created by the hunched over Rei in the deeper background that for whatever reason wasn't made transparent. The bracket, however, is meant to be there.

NemZ wrote:This is based on the last version that was posted:



>cropped the unfiltered edges away
>used healing brush to erase the reiquarium (probably a little still there)
>applied a light gradient overlay to even out the tones a bit
>fine-tunned highlight/shade levels to bring out the contrast

...still looks like a campfire surrounded by rocks to me.

I didn't see it before but I see it now, the kneeling man in the white shirt. Also what looks to be a statue on a ledge behind him.