[X] My Assistant

[elakdawalla]

Over in the Roving Mars IMAX thread the suggestion was made that we should storyboard our own MER movie and show them what they should have done. One of the other writers at the Society is currently assembling an absolutely enormous month-by-month retrospective on the last two years of both missions that probably no one except UMSF diehards will be able to slog through, but you guys should love it. The retrospective will be posted as a news story but what I want to do is to take it and turn it into a feature in the MER section of our site that follows the rovers' missions on Mars from site to site and traverse to traverse. But I'll need some help.

The main help I'm asking for is: how best to split the stories of both rovers into manageable chunks? You couldn't possibly tell the whole story on one Web page; you'll need to divide it, and if you divide it it makes sense to me to divide it based on geography. For Oppy you could begin with the interior of Eagle Crater, (though that might be kind of a big chunk), and then maybe make a divide at sol 57 when she exited, have the next section cover the traverse to Endurance, and then go on to the next section on the exterior of Endurance at sol 95, and so on. I need help identifying good "chunks," and which sols / calendar dates they apply to (and for the technically inclined, a sidebar could list the SCLK and site/drive ranges for each chunk). Then the fun of illustrating can begin. We'll show those IMAX folks what they should have done.


Anybody have ideas to offer?

--Emily

[djellison]

I'm waiting for the Jennifer at the MER notebook to pull out the course png's from the mobility reports before I make a series of very very big, very very accurate route maps of the rovers, and actually they'll be split into sections about the same as the suggestions here It'll be a big project, and probably a few months in the making, but it might make a sensible addition to a big mer-report.

I'll probably split them into smaller chunks that a 'tell the tale' story might do however.

As for our own MER movie...well...I've done some technical experiments in to panning around MER panoramas at WMV-HD 1080i resolution. 720p resolution is probably more realistic in terms of platforms that will play it, but it is, again, a huge huge project. I would very much like to put together a little Sol 1000 movie but wouldnt dream of trying to put anything over the web at 720p res. In my mind it goes to specific music tracks, but copyright reasons would preclude me including that, and it sort of ruins the effect

There's so many ways to tell the story, so much story to tell, and so little time to spend telling it

Doug