Yuri’s Night is an international celebration of humans in space. Every year for twenty years, they’ve put on an international party in multiple locations, on the anniversary weekend of Yuri Gagarin’s first human flight beyond Earth on April 12, 1963. For this year’s event, I edited and co-produced a trailer for the upcoming livestream.
This was initiated via ideas from Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides, and co-produced with Wade Harpootlian. Graphic design consulting by Ryan Stuit of Subtractive Agency … Subtractive also provided lots of the footage in the trailer. Music by Robot Repair and voiceover by Pauli The PSM. The whole Yuri’s team provided valuable creative feedback throughout the development and editing process.
I really enjoyed putting together this trailer. For a long while I’ve wanted to do a piece purely dedicated to the thrill of space exploration and this was my chance to do it. I hope to do much more in this vein!
Last year, I worked with Yuri’s Night on two other projects. One, was to create a virtual reality space for people to watch the 2020 livestream. I set out to create an original STEM-oriented space in AltspaceVR, and in the process, came across a group called Rocket Party, who already had done what I was thinking of, so we simply partnered up and had a great turn out in their space-themed virtual room.
Two, was to help update and migrate the Yuri’s Night website, which had gotten out of date. I had some WordPress history, so put it to use. Again there was great help from the core term, and other volunteers including Mary Liz Bender of Cosmic Perspective. She was primarily responsible for the new design, and I was primarily responsible for the infrastructure. I learned a great deal along the way about Amazon Web Services and Elementor Pro.
Finally, we launched, just in time to get right into promotion for the next (2021) virtual party, to be run in large part by Subtractive and tmro and whose trailer is featured above! There’s a huge roster of impressive space oriented humans who will be showing up. Come join us this year at Yuri’s Night April 10! Ad Astra…