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ApolloLego
When the Lego Saturn V came out 2 years ago, I had the idea to recreate the Apollo 11 mission using it. In realtime. This was partly inspired by Tom Sachs' art installations, and partly by the moon landing anniversary party I didn't make happen in 1989. A few weeks ago, 50 years after the original events to the ~minute, the reenactment went up on ApolloLego on Twitter. By the end of the mission I had made almost 200 updates with as many unique pictures. The response was good, with the account gaining over 1,000 followers in a week and getting likes and retweets from some people I really respect and admire. And complete strangers were unrelentingly enthusiastic about it. It was the first time I've had a 100% positive experience online in far too long. I'm planning to do it all over again for Apollo 13 next spring.
I started with this NASA timeline of the mission, imported into a spreadsheet set up to turn mission time into PDT for convenience. It wasn't was perfect source, though, as it's pretty dry. It's also a bit inconsistent in how it phrases things, for instance listing the PSEP (Passive Seismic Experiment package) as being turned off on Aug 3 and then the EASEP being shut down on Aug 27. Except the only thing on the EASEP (Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package) which could be turned off was the PSEP! Yet other sources says it was shut down after 21 days, which doesn't match either of those dates. I finally found the preliminary science report which made it clear: PSEP was shut down on Aug for the lunar night, then turned back on Aug 19 for its second lunar day, to finally die on Aug 27 for a total running time of 21 days!
To make it all a bit more human, I ended up making extensive use of the Apollo Flight and Lunar Surface Journals. These are a phenomenal source of information. I'd never just read through them before, and it turns out that they're filled with wonderful little moments with the crew. Like the ongoing discussion of rather the moon is grey or brown, or a long debate about the orbital dynamics of a urine dump. A lot of these were too long to turn into tweets, sadly, but I still found plenty to work with.
This new descent visualization, also put out by the Apollo Flight Journal, really helped me conceptualize the landing process. It's a pretty incredible piece of infovis, and it makes for surprisingly engaging viewing. (More engaging than the dramatization in HBO's From Earth to the Moon, I have to say.) It should maybe be nominated as a related work Hugo next year?
The aesthetics were a challenge for me. It was inevitably going to be twee and cutesy, and my production constraints meant that the pictures were never going to be technically great. I chose to embrace this as an exercise in pushing back against the perfectionism that has been growing in me as of late. I tried to follow the "3 take" production guidelines of The Asylum (makers of movies such as Sharknado): You get 3 chances to get a shot, and then you move on, no matter what. I didn't actually manage to live up to this, particularly later on in the process as I got a bit fancier. But it was a nice inspiration.
Production started by building the launch tower, which to fit the Saturn V model needed to be well over a meter tall. I was pretty happy with the result, being both cutesy-crafty and reasonably accurate.
I managed to keep at least 24 hours ahead of schedule for most of the mission, only dropping under 12 hours during the intense action of July 19/20/21. It did take up most of my spare time, though. Extracting the material to generate the shot list took a couple hours most days, and a similar amount of time to photograph. It didn't leave much time for ephemeral concerns like cleaning up between shots. Lego, bits of felt, and globs of polyfil were everywhere. Luckily my roommates are very tolerant. Also convenient: the bookshelves I recently replaced were still sitting in the dining room, which saw heavy use for backdrop and armature mounting purposes. Polyfil ended up being one of the most useful things I bought, good for rocket exhaust, cryogenic fog, clouds, lunar dust and atmosphere venting.
I originally used a black cardboard screen as the space backdrop, but the results weren't satisfying. During the relative lull in activity as the crew coasted out to lunar orbit, I upgraded to a much nicer fabric backdrop. It was a stretch knit that I chose primarily because it was the darkest black I could find. However, the stretch aspect ended up being really useful when it came to reducing visible folds and wrinkles. I did steam some sections once or twice, but for the most part I just adjusted things as best as possible with some large chunks of aluminum from my scrap bin as weights.
For Tranquillity Base, the location of ~50 shots, I decided I needed to get a bit fancier. There is a lot more going on than just a couple vehicles floating in space. The relative position of the LM and the astronauts and the various bits of equipment needed to be kept consistent over several hours of photography, and I wanted the horizon to look at least decent. The solution I came up with was to cut a 4 foot disk of plywood, cover it in felt, and place it on a spinning cake decoration stand. This let me set up the entire location once, then spin it around as needed to get access to different areas. In the end, it probably wasn't worth the effort, but it was pretty slick in operation.
Some shots were worth a bit of extra effort, like the iconic footprint in the dust shot. I had been thinking about flour or concrete mix, but then I remembered the little vial of playa dust I keep. It isn't even the first time I've compared playa dust to regolith! Being able to use something so close to my heart felt right. A thin layer spread out on a plate, and a couple experiments to get the lighting right, and I had it.
Sometimes it was the really simple shots that I loved, like this one of the Earth seen from the roof hatch on the LM from the lunar surface.
I came up with a deeply stupid way to do greenscreen, and I loved it: I found a picture of mission control on my laptop, set it down with the screen horizontal, and laid a minifig on it. Truly desperation is the mother of invention.
I rounded up all the household minifigs I could for the crowd scenes watching the launch. (A quirk of the Agora turns out to be that the vast majority of our minifigs are women, or superheroes, or both.) The countdown clock was made by cutting out the digital display segments, so the time could be changed by slipping in different pieces of paper with the right areas darkened with a sharpie. This worked surprisingly well. (The rocket in this picture is the escape tower from the full model, btw.)
I was never 100% satisfied with the effect, but using a propane torch and a yellow lighting gel to generate the plasma of reentry was good fun.
Sometimes it was the ridiculously dorky shots that made me the proudest, like this one when Aldrin was looking through the monocular back at Earth. Plus, it let me use a much beloved and abused old atlas from middle school that has been sitting idle for far too long.
I had to make a Lego DSKY, of course. (Have I mentioned I've been getting obsessed with the Apollo Guidance Computer? Because I have.) I even included a teeny-tiny 1202 error on it.
I don't mind admitting I put a lot of effort into this shot, recreating Collins' iconic picture.
I thought this shot was going to be much harder than it was -- I was imagining using epoxy or something to make the water droplets. But then I remembered that water tension doesn't scale, and for once that would be in my favor! I was able to place droplets with the point of an awl and they acted almost exactly like full scale water would in freefall. (I just happened to have a Lego welding torch, which was a perfect standin for the water gun on Apollo.)
By the end I was having fun getting a bit more fancy, such as including the apex cover flying away during drogue parachute deployment, and an action shot of actual parachutes inflated by a fan behind the capsule.
The station 5 panorama matches the original well enough, but it's too washed out. You can't make out the Little West crater at all. This was what I originally wanted the turn table for, so I could make this panorama by rotating the set around the camera. Unfortunately, it seems like Android uses the rotation sensors as input to the panorama generation. It did not handle the confusion well, so I ended up doing this one by hand.
Someone mentioned doing this as a book, and while I don't see that happening, I have been thinking about how I would do it. I'd need a minifig-scale CSM and some real interior sets. Having to do the recovery operations after splashdown at microfig scale was really disappointing. There is a third-party Lego kit for the launch tower I'd want to use. And I'd put together a better collection of minifigs, particularly for mission control. The greatest limitation ended up being my camera. This was all done on my Pixel 2, and the only effects applied in post was to turn a few black/white for the television shots. It's a great camera, but what I really needed was a macro mode. There were quite a few shots I wanted but just couldn't make work because the camera couldn't get close enough to the action. I was also unsatisfied with the lighting on the lunar surface. It needed to be much higher contrast, and I was a bit sloppy about keeping its direction constant as I shot from different angles. A DSLR on a tripod and just a bit of real lighting would make a huge difference.
...I do admit the book idea would be pretty cool, though. Slightly higher quality, still equally cutesy pictures combined with some really in-depth technical content, following all the interesting little tangents on the subject that I know or could dig up. The kind of book that could completely change a child's life, given to them at the right time to ignite a lifelong obsession. That would be great.
I started with this NASA timeline of the mission, imported into a spreadsheet set up to turn mission time into PDT for convenience. It wasn't was perfect source, though, as it's pretty dry. It's also a bit inconsistent in how it phrases things, for instance listing the PSEP (Passive Seismic Experiment package) as being turned off on Aug 3 and then the EASEP being shut down on Aug 27. Except the only thing on the EASEP (Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package) which could be turned off was the PSEP! Yet other sources says it was shut down after 21 days, which doesn't match either of those dates. I finally found the preliminary science report which made it clear: PSEP was shut down on Aug for the lunar night, then turned back on Aug 19 for its second lunar day, to finally die on Aug 27 for a total running time of 21 days!
To make it all a bit more human, I ended up making extensive use of the Apollo Flight and Lunar Surface Journals. These are a phenomenal source of information. I'd never just read through them before, and it turns out that they're filled with wonderful little moments with the crew. Like the ongoing discussion of rather the moon is grey or brown, or a long debate about the orbital dynamics of a urine dump. A lot of these were too long to turn into tweets, sadly, but I still found plenty to work with.
This new descent visualization, also put out by the Apollo Flight Journal, really helped me conceptualize the landing process. It's a pretty incredible piece of infovis, and it makes for surprisingly engaging viewing. (More engaging than the dramatization in HBO's From Earth to the Moon, I have to say.) It should maybe be nominated as a related work Hugo next year?
The aesthetics were a challenge for me. It was inevitably going to be twee and cutesy, and my production constraints meant that the pictures were never going to be technically great. I chose to embrace this as an exercise in pushing back against the perfectionism that has been growing in me as of late. I tried to follow the "3 take" production guidelines of The Asylum (makers of movies such as Sharknado): You get 3 chances to get a shot, and then you move on, no matter what. I didn't actually manage to live up to this, particularly later on in the process as I got a bit fancier. But it was a nice inspiration.
Production started by building the launch tower, which to fit the Saturn V model needed to be well over a meter tall. I was pretty happy with the result, being both cutesy-crafty and reasonably accurate.
I managed to keep at least 24 hours ahead of schedule for most of the mission, only dropping under 12 hours during the intense action of July 19/20/21. It did take up most of my spare time, though. Extracting the material to generate the shot list took a couple hours most days, and a similar amount of time to photograph. It didn't leave much time for ephemeral concerns like cleaning up between shots. Lego, bits of felt, and globs of polyfil were everywhere. Luckily my roommates are very tolerant. Also convenient: the bookshelves I recently replaced were still sitting in the dining room, which saw heavy use for backdrop and armature mounting purposes. Polyfil ended up being one of the most useful things I bought, good for rocket exhaust, cryogenic fog, clouds, lunar dust and atmosphere venting.
I originally used a black cardboard screen as the space backdrop, but the results weren't satisfying. During the relative lull in activity as the crew coasted out to lunar orbit, I upgraded to a much nicer fabric backdrop. It was a stretch knit that I chose primarily because it was the darkest black I could find. However, the stretch aspect ended up being really useful when it came to reducing visible folds and wrinkles. I did steam some sections once or twice, but for the most part I just adjusted things as best as possible with some large chunks of aluminum from my scrap bin as weights.
For Tranquillity Base, the location of ~50 shots, I decided I needed to get a bit fancier. There is a lot more going on than just a couple vehicles floating in space. The relative position of the LM and the astronauts and the various bits of equipment needed to be kept consistent over several hours of photography, and I wanted the horizon to look at least decent. The solution I came up with was to cut a 4 foot disk of plywood, cover it in felt, and place it on a spinning cake decoration stand. This let me set up the entire location once, then spin it around as needed to get access to different areas. In the end, it probably wasn't worth the effort, but it was pretty slick in operation.
Some shots were worth a bit of extra effort, like the iconic footprint in the dust shot. I had been thinking about flour or concrete mix, but then I remembered the little vial of playa dust I keep. It isn't even the first time I've compared playa dust to regolith! Being able to use something so close to my heart felt right. A thin layer spread out on a plate, and a couple experiments to get the lighting right, and I had it.
Sometimes it was the really simple shots that I loved, like this one of the Earth seen from the roof hatch on the LM from the lunar surface.
I came up with a deeply stupid way to do greenscreen, and I loved it: I found a picture of mission control on my laptop, set it down with the screen horizontal, and laid a minifig on it. Truly desperation is the mother of invention.
I rounded up all the household minifigs I could for the crowd scenes watching the launch. (A quirk of the Agora turns out to be that the vast majority of our minifigs are women, or superheroes, or both.) The countdown clock was made by cutting out the digital display segments, so the time could be changed by slipping in different pieces of paper with the right areas darkened with a sharpie. This worked surprisingly well. (The rocket in this picture is the escape tower from the full model, btw.)
I was never 100% satisfied with the effect, but using a propane torch and a yellow lighting gel to generate the plasma of reentry was good fun.
Sometimes it was the ridiculously dorky shots that made me the proudest, like this one when Aldrin was looking through the monocular back at Earth. Plus, it let me use a much beloved and abused old atlas from middle school that has been sitting idle for far too long.
I had to make a Lego DSKY, of course. (Have I mentioned I've been getting obsessed with the Apollo Guidance Computer? Because I have.) I even included a teeny-tiny 1202 error on it.
I don't mind admitting I put a lot of effort into this shot, recreating Collins' iconic picture.
I thought this shot was going to be much harder than it was -- I was imagining using epoxy or something to make the water droplets. But then I remembered that water tension doesn't scale, and for once that would be in my favor! I was able to place droplets with the point of an awl and they acted almost exactly like full scale water would in freefall. (I just happened to have a Lego welding torch, which was a perfect standin for the water gun on Apollo.)
By the end I was having fun getting a bit more fancy, such as including the apex cover flying away during drogue parachute deployment, and an action shot of actual parachutes inflated by a fan behind the capsule.
The station 5 panorama matches the original well enough, but it's too washed out. You can't make out the Little West crater at all. This was what I originally wanted the turn table for, so I could make this panorama by rotating the set around the camera. Unfortunately, it seems like Android uses the rotation sensors as input to the panorama generation. It did not handle the confusion well, so I ended up doing this one by hand.
Someone mentioned doing this as a book, and while I don't see that happening, I have been thinking about how I would do it. I'd need a minifig-scale CSM and some real interior sets. Having to do the recovery operations after splashdown at microfig scale was really disappointing. There is a third-party Lego kit for the launch tower I'd want to use. And I'd put together a better collection of minifigs, particularly for mission control. The greatest limitation ended up being my camera. This was all done on my Pixel 2, and the only effects applied in post was to turn a few black/white for the television shots. It's a great camera, but what I really needed was a macro mode. There were quite a few shots I wanted but just couldn't make work because the camera couldn't get close enough to the action. I was also unsatisfied with the lighting on the lunar surface. It needed to be much higher contrast, and I was a bit sloppy about keeping its direction constant as I shot from different angles. A DSLR on a tripod and just a bit of real lighting would make a huge difference.
...I do admit the book idea would be pretty cool, though. Slightly higher quality, still equally cutesy pictures combined with some really in-depth technical content, following all the interesting little tangents on the subject that I know or could dig up. The kind of book that could completely change a child's life, given to them at the right time to ignite a lifelong obsession. That would be great.
no subject
I had ENORMOUS amounts of fun following your lego journeys - when I first subscribed I was worried that I'd miss everything because I know anything that happens during USA day is generally overnight here, and so I left a tab on my browser open just to your twitter feed so I could reload it and then read everything in the right order after I woke up :) It was pretty much the first thing I checked when I got up every morning.
I was born 6 years after the moon landing, so although it was kind of a fact of life it was also recent enough that I never learned about it in school or really learned anything about it at ALL until I was well into adulthood. I was thinking recently about how people born in 2007 would have experienced 9/11 might be a bit similar - at that point all the adults around you already know it because they saw it, but it's not long enough ago to be "history" yet, so it's a kind of odd situation when you're born afterwards like that and miss out from both directions.
So it's been truly joyous that now I'm 44 and the whole world filled up with stuff like you and the 13 Minutes To The Moon podcasts and lots of written articles and miscellaneous videos and suddenly I feel like I've filled in all these knowledge gaps at last, and in the most entertaining way possible! Thanks so much <3
no subject
I also liked the mission control greenscreen a lot because it was just kind of hilarious. :D
no subject
Is the footprint from a minifig foot?
no subject
no subject
no subject
Hell yes, you are!