I am very pleased to announce the start of a new project for me: short, high-quality astronomy videos posted on Hulu.com!
Before I bore you with details, here’s one of the first videos: The Cookbook of Galactic Cannibalism (after a very short ad).
There are two more up right now as well: Black Hole Death Rays and The Changing Face of Mars. They are on Hulu under the channel name Bad Astronomy.
These videos are a collaboration between producer/director Tom Lucas (who made such fantastic documentaries as “Runaway Universe” and “Supertwister”), cameraman Rich Lerner, and me. I met Tom a few years back when we worked together on the planetarium show “Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity” (and the NOVA program that came out of that, “Monster in the Middle”).
The idea for these videos was to make shorter (<5 minutes) but still high-quality mini-documentaries that are interesting, fun, and feature very cool animations from NASA and other sources. We created these three as a test to see how things go, and we have plans to make many more.
I’m pretty excited about this; I foresee a pretty good future here. We filmed these in hi-def so that even higher-quality footage can be available if needed, so these shorts can be used in a lot of venues. I’d love to see these getting into classrooms, for example.
And we’re looking at many different topics. Got any ideas? Feel free to leave comments here, but keep in mind the topic can’t be too broad (dark energy might be tough to tackle in less than 5 minutes, though it would be interesting to try – in fact, while writing that sentence I came up with an idea I might want to test out…), needs to have a “coolness” factor to it, and, of course, dynamite visuals.
We’ll be starting up more of these pretty soon, so stay tuned!
Update: Hulu.com is not available outside the US, but we will be putting the vids up on other sources which can be seen anywhere very soon.
