Good Night Oppy director Ryan White on the people at NASA who built a beloved robot on Mars – Rivals Documentary

In the new documentary Good night OppieThe Mars Opportunity Rover becomes an unattended robot that can: become an instrument platform, roll over a rusted landscape millions of kilometers away, search for signs of extraterrestrial life, and survive its own projected existence for nearly 15 years.

But without the people of Opportunity — “our human characters,” as director Ryan White affectionately called the engineers, scientists and programmers on the acclaimed mission — there would be no public love for this unsinkable machine. Without her, “it’s just a box of screws and wires,” he said at the Deadlines Contenders Documentary Event, which also featured the film’s Oscar-winning sound designer Mark Mangini and Emmy winner Blake Neely.

Now in limited release and streaming on Prime Video, the Amblin Entertainment and Amazon Studios film, narrated by Angela Bassett, was the highlight of November’s Critics Choice Documentary Awards, taking home five awards, including the highest award, Gold for Best Documentary.

White called Opportunity — “Oppy” to the makers and administrators — a proxy for all adventurers at NASA who want to go to Mars themselves. “But since she can’t, she’s our little intrepid, brave explorer, doing the things we can’t do on our own,” he said, “and so we project our own aspirations, our own emotions, our own fears.” The robbers.”

NASA launched Opportunity and its twin Spirit in 2003 and months later landed them on either side of Mars to survey, photograph and study their environment. Arrive follow both. Spirit stalled in 2009 and stopped communicating with crews on Earth in 2010. The event continued for another eight years, sending photographs, data and analysis of soil samples that increased knowledge of the Red Planet and guided science for future missions. The last contact with the house was in June 2018.

The filmmakers drew on the technological expertise of two California institutions to create the film: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena provided masses of rover imagery, and George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic in San Francisco processed the raw visual data. photorealistic data environments around the film. .

Two-time Oscar-winning sound designer Mangini, who worked on his first documentary, said NASA gave him Mars surface audio from a later mission, Perseverance (since Opportunity had no microphones) and let him record rover prototypes to help Opportunity bring to the screen … showing a vocabulary of mechanical sounds.

Neely said that as a composer, he treated the Opportunity and Spirit robots as individuals who would engage an audience — a task he says also involved drawing “two death scenes,” one for each rover.

“My job was to make you believe in Oppy with real sound,” said Mangini. “But Blake got you interested in Oppy and that was essential to our film.”

Check back Wednesday for the panel video.