Project Name
STELLA
Posted in
Short Film, Video
Cultural Institute
Fabrica
Detailed Information
Project NameSTELLAPosted inShort Film, VideoCultural InstituteFabrica

To celebrate the launch of its new satellite into space, the European Space Agency (ESA) commissioned Fabrica, the design and research department of Benetton under the direction of Sam Baron, to create a short video about our life on Earth and our relationship to outer space. A team of Fabrica researchers used satellite images from ESA’s archive depicting landscapes and distant space objects and creatively combined them with textures from animals, materials and humans as a way to show that the distant and unknown has more in common with our immediate surroundings than we might think.

ESA’s new satellite is called Sentinel-2B, and is the second of a pair of satellites set to orbit the Earth and provide images for environmental monitoring purposes. Due to be launched on March 7th, the new satellite will orbit the planet every 10 days, and will fly at the modest altitude of 786 kilometres. With a sleepless eye turned to our planet, the Sentinel mission will constantly record changes on the landscape with extreme precision, and help assess natural phenomena and anomalies; for example, the earlier Sentinel 2 mission helped discover a dangerous crack on the Antarctic ice shelf last month, which prompted the evacuation of a manned research facility nearby.

This video is an imagination experiment of a cosmic journey, with the intention to bring the outer space into our space, expand our space to outer space, mixing earth images with space images (ESA footage). A collaboration between Fabrica and ESA.

Music Francesco Novara
Direction Laura Sans
Creative director Kenzi Benabdallah
Assistant director Karen Oetling and Lorena Alvarado 
Edit Laura Sans and Kenzi Benabdallah
Motion graphic Christian Coppe 
Project manager Shek Po Kwan 
Production Chiara Codognotto

Thanks to Marina Vitaglione, model

Special thanks to Oasi Cervara

1:20' photo take from JAXA's ALOS mission.

Fabrica’s video for Sentinel-2B poetically explores the connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm, drawing visual parallels between patterns and shapes found both in small animals, land formations, planets and stellar nebula. Aptly titled Stella, the video portrays the Earth as a mirror of the stars: glistening sands and mysteriously blobbing Ferrofluid remind of the evening sky, while patterns from the Moon, Venus and Mars have striking similarities to the foliage and scales of birds and reptiles. One of the most evocative moments in the video is the appearance of a satellite photo from Central Northern Iran’s Salt Desert, which morphs into an image of flowing, golden hair. Just as we seek intimacy and beauty in our relationships and surroundings, so do humanity’s mechanical “eyes” which constantly gaze down on our planet. Hopefully they will help us preserve its treasures for future generations. 

Photo courtesy Fabrica and European Space Agency (ESA).

Photo courtesy Fabrica and European Space Agency (ESA).

Photo courtesy Fabrica and European Space Agency (ESA).

Photo courtesy Fabrica and European Space Agency (ESA).

Photo courtesy Fabrica and European Space Agency (ESA).

Photo courtesy Fabrica and European Space Agency (ESA).

Photo courtesy Fabrica and European Space Agency (ESA).

Photo courtesy Fabrica and European Space Agency (ESA).

STELLA: A Video Panorama from Earth to the Stars and Back Again

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