For the first installment of “Remarkable Short Docs” we present Cassini Mission, an eerie trip to the moons of Saturn through repurposed NASA footage. Designer and director Chris Abbas spoke with Ben via phone and email.
Ben: Cassini Mission is stitched together out of thousands of still images, shot for scientific—not cinematic—reasons. How did you discover the potential there?
Chris: Late one night, I discovered a huge library containing raw images of Saturn on the JPL Cassini Solstice Mission website. At a glance it seemed like the images were displayed in sequential order, so I downloaded some and played them back at twenty-four frames per second. The result was incredibly interesting to me—it was like watching a timelapse in space—so onward it went until I was finished.
Ben: What software did you use, and what was your workflow to deal with so many still images?
Chris: There was a slow back and forth process between Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro. A lot of time was spent feeling out how the shots lived next to each other as the frenetic nature of the footage was quite challenging to edit.
My method for asset management was perhaps a bit ridiculous … I pulled down a little more than 200,000 images over the course of a week with a Firefox extension named Scrapbook. Part of the process involved sorting the imagery (the script retrieved images that were small, medium, and large), so I made a simple Automator script that would sort all the files for me based on image resolution.
Once organized, I had to go through every sequence and sort them manually—moons, stars, planets, fly-bys, calibration processes, and so forth.
Ben: What are we hearing in this—what’s the music, and what’s behind the sound design and sound effects?
Chris: The music is from the wonderful Nine Inch Nails album “Ghosts I-IV,” used under a Creative Commons license, and the sound design actually comes from Cassini itself, courtesy of the radio and plasma wave science instrument. The spacecraft recorded radio emissions near the poles of Saturn and NASA translated them into an audible frequency. It seemed like a natural fit for the sound design.
Ben: Most of the astronomic images we see are are so sterile and scientific—in comparison, Cassini Mission feels a little bit like a handheld camera in space. Almost like there was a human behind it, in other words. What is it about this aesthetic that you enjoy?
Chris: I enjoy the honesty and realism of the imagery the most. In their unfiltered state, the photographs feel true to life. You’re absolutely right that most scientific and astronomic imagery we see today is seemingly perfect. And that’s wonderful; I’m glad we have the technology to do it. However, that level of perfection can enable us to overlook the reality that thousands of extremely hardworking people put a camera (among other brilliant things) into space, then sent it to another planet, and proceeded to beam those images back to Earth. The raw, unretouched quality of those photographs reminds me of the great challenges we endured to achieve such a feat.
Ben: How many of the visual effects (those cool circle artifacts, the weird graph on the right in some shots, etc.) are “in-camera,” and how much did you add digitally?
Chris: All of the artifacts and lens aberrations were captured in-camera … space is really, really dirty it seems. The digital enhancements were minimal, limited to color correction, pan-scanning, dust-busting, and resequencing some of the bracketed exposures. There is also one shot at the end—Saturn rotating and drifting away—that is a composite.
Ben: I knew that you were the type of guy who pays crazy attention to detail when I noticed that there’s some chromatic aberration on the credit text. Can you describe what I’m seeing? Why did you do that?
Chris: Initially, the type didn’t feel right. There was an unnatural crispness, this artificial quality, that did not feel appropriate considering the aesthetic of the raw footage. After some time, the solution became clear: I needed to see the type through a lens the same way Cassini saw the cosmos through its lens.
Ben: I look at your work on Vimeo and see you experimenting with ideas of scale and extremes of magnification. For example, your work on the House title sequence and God of Small Things deals with very small objects, and Cassini Mission is about incredibly large objects. Why do you think you’re drawn to this? Is it something about telescopes and microscopes?
Chris: I’d like to say all this work revolves around subconscious themes in my mind, but alas, I’m afraid it was a matter of coincidence. There is something very interesting, however, about the vast, astronomical distances in space and the vast, astronomical distances at the atomic level.
Ben: Speaking of the House title sequence, can you talk a little bit about your job at Digital Kitchen and how that interacts with your personal work? What do you do there?
Chris: I feel lucky that I’m able to wear a few different hats at DK. Depending on the project, I may be a director, animator, compositor, designer, illustrator, and sometimes (if I’m lucky) a camera operator. I suppose my job interacts with personal work in that they both ferociously fight for my time and energy … Kidding aside, it’s the brilliant people I spend my days with that affect my work the most.
Ben: You told me that sometimes when you finish work, the last thing you want to do is stare at another “glowing rectangle.” Where do you get your creative energy, and what gets you into creative flow? How do you stay there?
Chris: This is a tough question. I feel like there are several tiers of inspiration from normal to extreme, all dependent on a plethora of variables ranging from sleeping habits to who you spoke with last. It’s difficult to say where my creative energy comes from. I can’t be absolutely certain; however, I often feel a desire to express myself. Perhaps that is what keeps the furnace burning.
