Celebrate International Women’s Day with ‘Women in Spaceflight’
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Women in Spaceflight, a collection of highlights from Felix & Paul Studios’ Emmy® Award-winning Space Explorers series. An inspiring journey that pays homage to pioneer Jerrie Cobb and all the women who changed spaceflight forever and are paving the way for the next steps in space exploration, Women in Spaceflight is a fitting (and free) way to commemorate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month.
To celebrate, we sat down with Felix & Paul Studios Vice President of Production Katarina Soukup to learn more.
Katarina Soukup: I come from the world of documentary filmmaking and produced auteur docs for international audiences for 15 years with my own production company prior to joining Felix & Paul Studios. I’ve known Félix Lajeunesse, Paul Raphael, and Stéphane Rituit, the founders of Felix & Paul Studios, for years.
Stéphane, Félix, and I met when we all worked with Isuma, the visionary Inuit collective behind Atanarjuat The Fast Runner—probably the most important Canadian film ever made. Later, I produced one of Félix’s first documentaries. When the trio founded the Felix & Paul Studios 10 years ago, I, like many others, eagerly followed their groundbreaking work in VR and was simply in awe when I saw images of their VR camera attached to the robotic arm of the International Space Station!
About two years ago, I realized I wanted to work on more ambitious projects that pushed beyond the somewhat staid formulas of traditional media. I also really wanted to work within a larger team. Shortly after that, the opportunity at the studio materialized—almost as if I’d conjured it!
KS: Coming from the documentary world—where empathy and understanding can blossom with privileged knowledge of people and worlds you would otherwise never know—one of the pieces that just blew my mind was Traveling While Black, which Felix & Paul Studios created in collaboration with Academy Award-winner Roger Ross Williams.
It’s a gorgeous immersive experience that transports you to Ben’s Chili Bowl diner in Washington, DC, sitting in the corner booth, with ghostly archival images projected on the walls recounting the history of civil rights, and recreations of the past at Ben’s are reflected in the mirror. But then, sitting across the table from you is Samaria Rice, telling you about the day her 12-year-old son Tamir died at the hands of police.
It was utterly riveting.
The element of presence that VR brings to the table made it one of the most powerful emotional experiences I’ve ever had. I could see VR had the power to take what I had been trying to achieve in traditional non-fiction formats for years and supercharge it. That was really exciting!
KS: I personally have been working on the Space Explorers series for about a year and a half, but the studio has been telling VR “stories in space” since 2016 when it launched production with NASA on Space Explorers: The Journey Begins. What I’ve learned is that space exploration is incredibly challenging, full of great risk but even greater accomplishment—and documenting it in VR shares all of that as well.
KS: My favorite part of Women in Spaceflight is Anne MacClain’s mom asking if the kids and teachers who ridiculed her dream to become an astronaut worked at NASA—because if they didn’t, then their opinion just didn’t matter. “I needed to keep going until the people who actually held that decision told me ‘no.’” The power of cutting out the noise and the naysayers. The power of moms!
KS: I think what surprised me most was to learn that the historic all-woman spacewalk that Jessica Meir and Christina Koch achieved in October 2019 was not actually planned. It was an emergency maintenance EVA that had to be organized in a matter of days (whereas most spacewalks are planned months or years in advance). Jessica and Christina happened to be the two crew members available to do it at the time, and the rest became history.
The astronauts themselves say they can’t fixate on achieving historic milestones because it might mean compromising safety. But as long as the astronaut pool continues to become more diverse, it’s only a matter of time before those milestones will be reached.
KS: That there is a place for all of us among the stars.
KS: I’m really eager to see how the power of immersive experiences can be pushed even further by seamlessly embedding cinematic linear VR content in interactive AR/MR and 6DOF environments.
That’s something that Felix & Paul Studios accomplished with Space Explorers: THE INFINITE, a traveling location-based experience that allows up to 150 people at a time to free roam in a life-size 3D model of the International Space Station (ISS) and access cinematic VR capsules filmed right in the place they are standing.
It really elevates that sense of “as if you are there” and the idea of storyliving versus storytelling. I think location-based entertainment (and shared virtual interactive spaces) are the future and will become as important as physical theaters were to traditional cinema for over a hundred years. They will be the places we gather to find powerful, transformative, and collective media experiences.
KS: VR has great potential for training future astronauts, since all of the NASA analogs are designed to give candidates familiarity with a particular environment, like the surface of the moon or the interior of the ISS. It also allows all of us on Earth to literally have a seat in the spacecraft, as we enter this new exciting chapter in deep-space exploration to the Moon and beyond with the Artemis missions.
KS: I can’t say how thrilled I am that we’re following the story of humanity’s return to the Moon and beyond in VR, starting with NASA’s Artemis missions, which will land the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface later this decade.
