Four Space Science Videos

A few weeks ago we announced that, through our partnership with Sheffield Hallam University, four teams of media and games design students had worked with us to adapt some of our previously published space science articles into animated videos. Since then, we've been releasing the videos through our YouTube channel. All four videos have now been released, so here's a quick round-up of the four.

The first of these was about the NASA space mission "New Horizons" which is currently en route to Pluto, based on Pluto's New Horizons by Peter Ray Allison. The video was created by a team of four students (Ryan Stewart, Jake Samson-Roberts, John Teo and Jason Vickers), who decided to use a similar "live animation" style as our previous video Why do we sleep?

The second group chose to animate Why are the planets so different?, by Adam Stevens. This group consisted of five students (Renny Nascimento, Will Pritchard, Clark O'Connell, Rachel ? and Romy Nelson). Their chosen style was to use stock motion with a 3D overlay which they produced using 3DS Max and Adobe After Effects, producing an 8-minute video with 5 sections.

The third animation took the article Juno - halfway there and home again by Cian O'Regan, and used computer animations software to produce a 7-minute video with a twist. The five group members (Charlie Britner, Elliot Dowd, Sam Healey, and Jason Hardwick) contrasted the cutting-edge space technology of the NASA Juno mission - a spacecraft currently en route to Jupiter - with century-old cinematography. The end result is quite profound.

It seems the folks at NASA liked it, too.

Cool student-made video by @irishspaceblog @TWeDK on the Juno mission--complete with throwback cinema vibe! http://t.co/fJkLDNCOva
— NASA's Juno Mission (@NASAJuno) July 31, 2014

Last but not least, team "Love and Stuff" created an animated version of Do Aliens Exist? bringing the article to life in a 4-minute video with a sense of humour that well reflects that of the author.

We hope you enjoy these videos, and that you will show your support and encouragement for the students who made them both in the comments here and on YouTube. The videos presented here are very different from each other in terms of length, style and duration, and we'd love to hear from other groups who'd like to use our content for their own projects! We'll support you in any (reasonable) way we can.