"WANDERERs" is an experimental, non-narrative animation utilizing footage from various Mars rovers and orbiters that were physically printed and then re-digitized with a microscope.
Capturing the childlike wonder of seeing an alien world for the first time the soundtrack brings us through the wonder and gravitas of landing on a different planet from our own.
Director's Statement:
"WANDERERs" was inspired by my experience when I saw the first images of the surface of Mars from the Pathfinder mission in 1997. I was only ten years old, but I marveled at the reality that we were looking at the surface of an actual alien world. Since Sojourner, we have been saturated by ultra-realistic CGI in movies and are consistently being transported to wondrous, albeit fictional worlds. I feel that this fact has stolen a bit of the gravitas that the original Pathfinder images had. I had the desire to transport us back to Mars through the eyes of Sojourner and thus took ultra-high-resolution images of Mars and make them more organic. I did this by physically printing out images from the rovers and then re-digitizing them under a microscope. The lens of the microscope makes Mars more tangible by making evident the uneven surface of the paper and juxtaposing it against the uneven surface of the Martian landscape, the ink mimicking the pitting on Mars’s surface.
Credits:
directed and animated by Christine A. Banna
sound by Christine A Banna
voices by Matt Arnold and Christine A Banna
images courtesy of NASA Goddard