A Very Special Message from Space Station Alpha

In the timelapse video "Further Up Yonder," we hear snippets of speech from the crew of the International Space Station, also known as Space Station Alpha. There are three crew up there at the moment, and as you hear in the video -- they are "the most forward-deployed citizens of the planet at this moment." While doing science experiments, they also shoot stunning photography, and thanks to NASA, that photography is available for free online. This video was made by film student Giacomo Sardelli, who wrote:

As a filmmaking student, this was my first attempt to craft a timelapse video. It has been a time consuming process, but it turned out as one of my most satisfying projects.
I focused my workflow on colours and harmony of movements, syncing every frame with the music and the voices of the astronauts. Every picture has been post processed individually before being imported in the NLE software, as I tried to take the most out of every image in terms of colours, contrast and neatiness.
Pictures were downloaded from the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center and edited with Photoshop CS6. Even if they were Hi-res images shot with Nikon D3S cameras, a lot of noise removal and color correction was needed, especially for those shots at ISO 3200, which was the highest ISO speed limit I've allowed myself to use, exception made for the last sequence of the spinning world, which comes from a sequenze of shots taken at ISO 12800. Daytime shots were taken at ISO 200. I've used Topaz Denoise 5 for noise removal, as it is very powerful and accurate when dealing with shadows and blacks.
Editing was made with Adobe Premiere CS6, with a 2K workflow, which allowed me to scale, rotate and pan image sequences whose native resolution is 4K. The video was downscaled to 1280x720 resolution for Vimeo. The original 2K version is available for download on my blog.

In my day, film students used 8mm film cameras without sound, cut by hand on flatbed editing bays. Also, in my day, we didn't even have an International Space Station (we had to make do with Skylab) -- so I guess times have changed. Enjoy.

Further Up Yonder from Giacomo Sardelli on Vimeo.

Note: if you're looking for subtitles, they're out there.

For more ISS goodness, check out: Starry Nights, as Seen from the International Space Station; Yet More Brilliant Space Station Video; Stunning Time Lapse of Earth Seen from Space Station; 11 Eye-Opening NASA Wakeup Calls; and Don Pettit's awesome Yo-Yos in Space!