I was fairly familiar with at least Apollo 11, so I wanted to do some research into it to explore it more and explore the wider Apollo Program in general. I wanted to get a diverse range of types of content and lengths, to get a sense of what does and doesn’t work for telling this story, which could help me to inform decisions further in the project while still being able to get a lot of information about the topic.
I thought a good starting point for this would be to watch the actual moon landing video. I’ve seen it many times before but this time I wanted to focus on the feeling and sounds of the video to be able to understand how people on earth experienced this at the time. The low-quality video and audio of the time are a really interesting part of the moon landing, considering how complex it was to get them to the moon. I think the contrast between what was being filmed and what was being used to film is fascinating and something that is important to highlight. I also think this could be something which could be used to make an engaging experience as it really shows how far we’ve come technology-wise since the landing and how much more we could do now.
Neil Armstrong - First Moon Landing 1969
I continued this exploration of how the landing was viewed at the time by watching this news coverage of the landing. The speechlessness is really striking and it would be really interesting to explore how this feeling could be recreated in an interactive experience.
From the archives: Apollo 11 moon landing leaves Walter Cronkite "speechless"
This was an interesting short documentary from before the moon landing and was distributed to schools around America. It talks about the Apollo 11 mission, and the Apollo Program in general. What was interesting to me about this was the positivity and patriotism which came from the project, and how inspiring it was for the nation. This is something I feel is lost and due to a stagnation of space programs, and could be something to investigate into for this project. I think theres a way to reposition the enthusiasm for space now around the possibilities that have arisen from year of technological advances.
"THE APOLLO PROJECT" 1969 EDUCATIONAL FILM NASA MOON MISSION OVERVIEW SATURN V ROCKET 58204
This more modern video from VOX covers similar content to the last, however has a really nice visual style which could serve as a great source of inspiration. It uses that 60s-80s technical illustration style which I remember from the likes of Thunderbirds and is a really interesting way of making really technical drawing quite beautiful. Visual style will be a massive part of this project and something I’m going to have to put a lot of though into.
Apollo 11’s journey to the moon, annotated
I watched this longer documentary as more of a informative experience for myself. I think it’s really important for me have a good understanding of the facts around Apollo so this was useful for me to remind myself of the facts. Something that stood out to me was how the actual space race feels underrepresented when compared to the moon landing, and thing could be an interesting angle to approach the project with.
Space Race to the Moon | Free Documentary
I also looked at the NASA websites page on the Apollo Program to see how they themselves present the information. This is quite a wordy page, but the thing that stood out to me was how little is known about the other Apollo Projects other than 11. I think exploring the other Apollo Projects could be an interesting way to take the project.
It’s been really useful exploring Apollo again. I feel I’ve learnt a lot I didn’t know about the Program originally and it has been really interesting to see the attitudes and moods around teh space race and programs at the time. This has been a really useful thing to do and has given me some really good initial ideas to take forward inti the project.
In class we did some group brainstorming to explore what ways we could make a more engaging experience to tell the story of the moon landing. The first brainstorm was around what sort of content and delivery could be used and this was really useful to an idea some areas to explore. AR/VR was an area suggested a lot which makes sense, as the best way for a user to understand the experience of the moon landing is go through it themselves, however, I do think this could be tricky to accomplish in an immersive website with the limited availability of AR/VR at the moment. Animation and media was another big area, which would work well for web format. This is something I want to explore as I start this project as to see what has and hasn’t been done before. An area that isn’t here but could work well is audio. Some of the most recognisable parts of the Apollo project come from audio between the space crafts and ground control. I think this could be a key aspect of my website to be able to capture the same atmosphere from the broadcasts of the moon landing through audio.
The next Brainstorm we did was a negative brainstorm, where we wrote the worst ways to engage users. This was also really useful as it gave me a lot of things to watch out for when working on this project, and a lot of new ideas by flipping the brainstormed ideas into positive ways.