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source: Apollo 13, Contact, Europa Report, Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian
audio: Symphony of Science, "Glorious Dawn (Cosmos Remix)"
length: 3:38
download: 161MB mp4 on mediafire
summary: The sky calls to us/If we do not destroy ourselves/We will one day venture to the stars
Original Festivids post
A Festivids 2015 treat for
niyalune. I saw her mention this vid as a throwaway concept in her letter…and started making the vid as soon as I finished my assignment. The reason, you see, is that I was convinced she would hate her gift vid, so I wanted to make her something that I was more confident she would like. (But then her reaction to Relations of Life was positive! As was other people's! Stranger things happen, I guess, but I honestly was not expecting it.)
This is the vid that I thought would be screamingly obvious, because I'd done the remaster of the Contact vid at the end of 2015 and this vid rather prominently features Contact. I also had the Interstellar and Europa Report clips sitting around, with the result that I only had to download and clip three additional movies, four if you count the BluRay of The Martian, which luckily came out in December. I had cam clips in the timeline for maybe about two weeks tops, and since everything was BluRay, I actually had a pretty easy time of it as far as multi-source vids go. This vid has the distinction of being the first (but assuredly not the last) for which I broke out a spreadsheet, so that I could make sure that I wasn't short-changing any of the sources, and that I was alternating them appropriately.
The song choice was obvious to me as soon as I thought about making the vid; I love the song and I love the concept, and for me there's no separating Carl Sagan from how I think about human spaceflight. I even named some of the Contact clips using some of his lines from this song while I was doing the remaster clipping way back in June, so it was a complete no-brainer to decide to use this song, cemented by my discovering that Neil DeGrasse Tyson had done promotional work for The Martian. (You should totally go watch the video, it's great.)
I was hugely tickled, and hugely flattered, to see some really great vidders guessed for this vid; I thought that the other dead giveaway would be the line at the beginning of the end titles. Star Trek fans will recognize the fade-in title card from the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which also features the history of human space exploration quite heavily. I definitely approached this vid in the spirit of conscious optimism that I associate with the core of Star Trek, and I hope that comes through in the vid.
One of the greatest things about getting to see other people's reactions to the vid has been seeing what they got out of it that I hadn't thought of or didn't consciously put in there; when
raven remarked that it was a vid that was more about the idea of exploration than fannishness, I thought, "Huh. Yeah, I guess so!" Which is to say, while I was making the vid with my spreadsheet I wanted to show people doing science; I wanted to show people looking up; I wanted to show the joy of exploration. (I wanted to show the Europa One crew smiling in a non-ominous context.) To that end I suppressed a lot of context (and a lot of doubled actors) in these movies, or just ignored it, which is especially obvious at the ending: Jim Lovell never actually walked on the moon, but he does in this vid, just as Matt Damon is watching the sunrise in the context of being convinced that he's going to die there on Mars, and Anne Hathaway believes she's as good as the last survivor of the human race, but that's not the feeling here. The Watney hope shots in the vid are as much for me as for anyone; I love space exploration, but now that I'm not a child any more I'm less blindly optimistic about the galaxyrise that Carl speaks of in the song. So the vid is an argument with myself as much as anything, and the end title is the conclusion that I wanted to make for that reason: the human adventure is just beginning. And finally, thanks to
mrquadcopter for beta watching.
Lyrics
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe
Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time
The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars
A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the Milky Way
The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature
I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky
But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit
From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds
The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we've waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting
audio: Symphony of Science, "Glorious Dawn (Cosmos Remix)"
length: 3:38
download: 161MB mp4 on mediafire
summary: The sky calls to us/If we do not destroy ourselves/We will one day venture to the stars
Original Festivids post
A Festivids 2015 treat for
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This is the vid that I thought would be screamingly obvious, because I'd done the remaster of the Contact vid at the end of 2015 and this vid rather prominently features Contact. I also had the Interstellar and Europa Report clips sitting around, with the result that I only had to download and clip three additional movies, four if you count the BluRay of The Martian, which luckily came out in December. I had cam clips in the timeline for maybe about two weeks tops, and since everything was BluRay, I actually had a pretty easy time of it as far as multi-source vids go. This vid has the distinction of being the first (but assuredly not the last) for which I broke out a spreadsheet, so that I could make sure that I wasn't short-changing any of the sources, and that I was alternating them appropriately.
The song choice was obvious to me as soon as I thought about making the vid; I love the song and I love the concept, and for me there's no separating Carl Sagan from how I think about human spaceflight. I even named some of the Contact clips using some of his lines from this song while I was doing the remaster clipping way back in June, so it was a complete no-brainer to decide to use this song, cemented by my discovering that Neil DeGrasse Tyson had done promotional work for The Martian. (You should totally go watch the video, it's great.)
I was hugely tickled, and hugely flattered, to see some really great vidders guessed for this vid; I thought that the other dead giveaway would be the line at the beginning of the end titles. Star Trek fans will recognize the fade-in title card from the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which also features the history of human space exploration quite heavily. I definitely approached this vid in the spirit of conscious optimism that I associate with the core of Star Trek, and I hope that comes through in the vid.
One of the greatest things about getting to see other people's reactions to the vid has been seeing what they got out of it that I hadn't thought of or didn't consciously put in there; when
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Lyrics
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe
Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time
The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars
A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the Milky Way
The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature
I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky
But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit
From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds
The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we've waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-14 19:26 (UTC)I love your song choice, and your themes of exploration, science, the future of humanity really shine through the vid.
Also now that I've rewatched it a lot, I wanted to point out some moments that I particularly loved:
"apple pie from scratch" with Mark growing his potatoes, "somewhen else in time" with Interstellar and the black hole, the whole verse with Apollo 13 and NASA improvising, "strange sounding ideas" and the Europa crew, "a glorious dawn awaits" with the sun rising on Mars, and all of the last verse.
By the way, it's really interesting to read your thoughts about the vid and your vidding process!
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-15 02:00 (UTC)A lot of those moments you mention are some of my favorites, particularly Watney and his potatoes and his making fire for them. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-14 23:25 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-15 00:38 (UTC)Re: the streaming, are you talking about the embed? The Critical Commons link is working for me in multiple browsers.
ETA: Thank you for pointing this out to me! I've found several embed issues, and I've replaced the embed with a Vimeo link. *beats head against the wall*
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-15 01:39 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-15 01:52 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-18 14:04 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-19 04:46 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-23 07:18 (UTC)*sniffles*
I really loved it.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-01 06:10 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-22 17:05 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-07-22 04:59 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-07-22 06:07 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-19 20:58 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-19 21:21 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-07-22 06:08 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-07-22 06:38 (UTC)(This is the one I show to people who don't know much about fandom when they ask what I mean when I say I edit video as a hobby.)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-07-09 08:18 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-07-16 19:26 (UTC)