‘The making of Juice’: the story behind the film
One giant planet. Three icy moons. An eight-year journey. One special spacecraft.
Building a mission to Jupiter took years of planning and thousands of people. Now that Juice is finally en route to its destination, our documentary ‘The making of Juice’ takes a look behind the scenes at the development and testing of the spacecraft in the three years leading up to launch. We hear from Juice Project Manager, Giuseppe Sarri, about how and why the film was made.
During autumn 2019, Olivier Witasse (Juice Project Scientist) and I were discussing the long-term plan for Juice outreach and we came up with the idea of filming key moments in the final stages of the development and testing of Juice. That year in March we’d had the ‘Critical Design Review’, which gave the green light to integrate and test the Juice spacecraft. It seemed just the right moment to start recording our progress, with the idea to capture not only the technical aspects but, above all, the human elements of this very challenging endeavour.
Olivier knew Maarten Roos who, besides being a well-known maker of space science movies, is a planetary scientist with a deep understanding of Jupiter. Olivier met Maarten in October 2019 to brainstorm over a coffee at Leiden Centraal train station. A first draft of the concept was proposed and discussed all together in December, and the activity kicked off in January 2020. After the first interviews with Olivier and myself in late February 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the project hard, as you can see from many interviewees wearing masks. But we managed!
Maarten was collecting so much special content, and we did not want to wait the launch of Juice to show it publicly. So he came up with the idea of regularly (every two to three months) releasing self-standing movies, each about five minutes long, to keep the public updated on the development of the spacecraft. With little imagination we called them ‘episodes’ and we released 12 of them. We also released 17 one-minute videos, which we called ‘snippets of action’.
After the launch of Juice, on 14 April 2023, Maarten combined everything together into one full-length documentary, and here we are: ‘The Making of Juice’ is ready for release. It includes stunning images of the integration and launch of the spacecraft; interviews with engineers, technicians, scientists and managers; and animations explaining the mission and its scientific objectives. It is an entertaining movie, easy to watch, telling the story of Juice from initial conception to the start of its voyage to Jupiter. And it shows that behind all great projects are great people.
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