Dive deep into the making of the latest series by National Geographic “Cosmos: Possible Worlds” to find out just how the incredible visual effects and set locations transport the audience. “Cosmos” host Neil deGrasse Tyson fielded questions from eager members of the press, including Nerd Alert News to discuss Ann Druyan’s boundless energy, cosmic telescopes, and what might be in store for our future. Tyson believes that he might just be a time lord that could hand this series to a next-generation: The “Doctor Who” of the series.
The brilliant mind of our time needs no introduction but to refresh our memories, he is a passionate astrophysicist, author, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and host of National Geographic Channel’s “Cosmos” and “StarTalk.” This New York City-born and raised scientist has his Bachelors’s in Physics from Harvard and his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Columbia. He had served on President Bush’s nine-member commission on the Implementation of the United States Space Exploration Policy, is the fifth head of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, has written book after book, paper after paper, and devotes his life to communicating science to all.
Host Neil deGrasse Tyson stands for a portrait. COSMOS: POSSIBLE WORLDS premieres March 9, 2020 on National Geographic. (Dan Smith/FOX)
Terry Terrones: Of course, my first question is on the show. I’m astounded as I’m watching it, just because of the visual intensity of it. It seems to be a mix of live-action green screen and you kind of walking through certain areas. Can you kind of give us a background on how the show is produced? Obviously you’re on vacation for some things, the Ship of the Imaginations looks like a green screen, but on a set. How does all this come together to form a show?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Well, first all the shots on Saturn’s moons, those were real. (laughs) There were many, many location shoots. For locations where…so now we’re talking about actual places, accessible places. Many, many location shoots, there were some locations that because of cost or just sort of production challenges, were done via green screen.
The way you do that is, you send a camera crew to the location where I would be standing. They take very high-resolution video of the region, including the terrain and the backdrop, and the exact orientation of the sun is noted. Then they come back. That’s way cheaper than shipping everybody there. Then they come back with these high-resolution video images, such as what would have been filmed if I were there. Now all you have to do is, put me in this high-resolution image. Then in a few cases, they’d build the foreground. I’d be on the foreground, and that would blend seamlessly into the background.
If you look at older green-screen attempts from maybe a few decades ago, you kind of knew it was fake, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on why. A lot of that had to do with your brain figuring out that…your brain does calculations even though you’re not aware of it. Your brain is figuring, “Wait a minute, the sun angle isn’t matched.” Or that you’re lit up here, but the sun is over there and all of a sudden you’re taken out of the image. We’re very elaborate. What looked elaborate to me, maybe it’s just commonplace for these folks, for the visual effects folks.
The exact angle of the sun is recorded, as well as the color temperature of the sun. As the sun gets lower in the sky, its color changes and you want to make note of that. Then when I’m put in the scene, I’m exactly lit by the proper illumination of the stage lights that resemble the sunlight, that’s otherwise in that scene. I forgot the exact fraction. Maybe a third of the places we could have gone to and didn’t, are green screen and the rest are real. For me, that’s a good combination, because it shows frugality when you need it to, but doesn’t rob the viewer of the full expanse of what could be on a location shoot or the cast or crew.
As far as the places that you don’t want to sensibly visit like black holes, the ship goes up to colliding black holes and dives into underwater. This is fully done on computer graphics, and we have the best in the business. The person working on this was head of the visual effects’ guild. These are people who work on $100 and $200 million films.
One of the great legacies of “Cosmos” or features of “Cosmos,” is that people know what it is. They care about it. They’ll bring their very high-level expertise that normally is given onto high budget movies, to this project. I think in the end, they know and they care about the mission statement that is represented in the storytelling. That’s how that is.
Redesigned and equipped with new capabilities, the Ship of the Imagination rises out of the Pacific, ready to take host Neil deGrasse Tyson and a global audience on 13 all-new adventures in spacetime. “Cosmos: Possible Worlds” premieres March 9, 2020, on National Geographic. (Cosmos Studios)
The green screen, I mean, the Ship of the Imagination–there is a 50-foot green screen outside the window. He came up and he’ll point with a laser in one spot and say, “Okay, a star just blew up right there, go.” Okay, now I’m good with blown up stars because I’m an astrophysicist. I can just picture all that in my head. All the Cosmic scenes were actually trivial for me to experience because I think about them all the time. I imagine myself traveling among them in my dreams. It’s only when inside a volcano or face-to-face with a worm, because the ship travels not only in space but in time and in size.
Another one, I have to confront a worm, a terrifying-looking worm. He says, “Go.” I said, “No, I need a visual reference for this please.” I see the visual references that they’re working from and that way I can… because I’m not an actor, so I have to sort of learn how to pretend I’m looking at it. That’s how all that came together.
I’m actually very happy with the final product. You’re right, it’s visually stunning and it’s seamlessly blended. We’re in the Netherlands just as we are in the bottom of the ocean, and saw this, one of Saturn’s moons. One last thing I’ll tell you. A minor bit of frustration for me…and I understood why but it was just, I live in the sightline of the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan of New York City. We green-screened that all, because we couldn’t ship everybody and close off the Brooklyn Bridge at night when we were doing it.
Well, we just did it. We sent the video folks and they came back. I just look like, “This is my neighborhood. This my neighborhood.” Well, they set it up and I have a thing I lean on. It’s a green-screen railing, which matches the railing in the actual Brooklyn Bridge. Cars are going by and bicycles are still riding by, and there I am. You’re not given a reason to think it’s a green screen, because it’s obviously otherwise a very accessible place. At the end, we don’t need anybody to be worried about it or thinking about it. I’d let the whole thing run seamlessly by.
Host Neil deGrasse Tyson is silhouetted against the birth of the cosmos – the Big Bang – at the inception of the Cosmic Calendar and its vast 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. COSMOS: POSSIBLE WORLDS premieres March 9, 2020 on National Geographic. (Cosmos Studios)
Colleen Bement: Our readers would like to know that after these few seasons, do you still have the same excitement that you did from the beginning? I mean, what a thrill to carry on Carl Sagan’s legacy. I know it’s been such a surreal for you because I know you actually met him. How’s the energy and the excitement level? Is it still just as exciting as it was when you first started?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: That’s a really good question. I can only comment on what happened, rather than what it could be. The reason why I say that is, if you count them all, this was the third season of “Cosmos”. First in 1980, then 34 years later, comes the next one. Then six years later, comes the next one. We’re doing better, 6 years instead of 34. Nowadays, people think of these things as seasons. “When is the next season coming?” No one said when the first “Cosmos” aired, “When is the next season?” That was not a thought. In 1980, it was viewed as a one-off documentary, multi-part documentary. I mean, you didn’t go to…who’s the guy that did the “Civil War” series for PBS?
You don’t go to him and say, “When is the next season of “Civil War” coming?” It’s just not how you’d do that, but that’s the expectation today. Fortunately, Ann Druyan, who is hugely creative, boundlessly creative in the middle of an expanding universe, the question of another season even beyond this would be a matter of, does she have the energy?
Not, do any of the rest of us have the energy? Does she have the energy to come up with all of the stories of these historical figures? She’s not only…as you’ve figured out by now presumably, she’s not only hyper-scientifically literate, though she’s not a scientist. She’s scientifically literate in all the ways one needs to be. She’s emotionally literate. She is our storyteller. By the way, she’s that special sauce that is shared among all three “Cosmos”. She co-wrote all three of them, and that’s what they have in common. That’s why “Cosmos” doesn’t settle on you as a normal documentary. It enters you in ways that science programming typically does not. You end up feeling for the characters, you end up being motivated to rise up with your newly acquired scientific insights and bring it to bear on making a better world. This one is specifically that, “Cosmos: Possible Worlds.” Presumably, you’ve seen at least one or two of the The founders of our company, both in their late 70s, are still coming into the office. I can’t believe it.
In that regard, there is no shortage…first, of scientific content, because the university is vast. There is no shortage of issues and topics that are relevant to our times. Yeah, I had no less energy for the third one as I did for the second one, as I experienced for the first one, watching Carl Sagan.
The real question would be, could we actually pull this off every year? For me, I don’t know, because the effort is so huge and the investment of time and energy. Have this happen every year, and you asked me that, I would’ve said, “Boy, I was exhausted by the end. I don’t know if I can do another one for another 10 years.”That’s not what happened. It was 6 years, after 34 years. I’d spoken to Ann and she’s talking about a fourth season. I said, “Okay if she’s got the energy, she’s older than all of us. She’s got that energy, who am I say I don’t?”
One final point about that, I had always imagined, after this second season, my first season, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could hand this off to a next-generation for every iteration of “Cosmos”?” Kind of like, “Doctor Who,” there is another Time Lord who comes in. I’m completely open to that, as a statement that you keep handing this to the next generation of Searchers, of scientists. We’ll see how Ann’s energy shakes out. Also, we’ll see how much the world needs another “Cosmos”. “Is there some other issue?” In 1980, the Cold War loomed heavy, as we were all held hostage to the conflict of political ideologies. Now, we have other challenges of course. In five years, what challenges will we confront then? Oh my gosh, or 10 years or even 3 years. “Cosmos” is at its best a way to flow science through the greatest challenges of the day, and offer signs of hope that we can go into the future as better shepherds of civilization than we have been.
Dana Abercrombie: Yes. Hi, thank you so much. I was wondering, how heavily involved are you with the concept of each season of the show?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yeah, that’s a great question. I carry three titles. The obvious one is the host of the show. I’m also a narrator, which makes sense since I’m also the host. Although not all programs are that way. I mean, not all productions in the world are that way, but it is in this case. I’m Executive Science Editor. The way this unfolds is, Ann thinks up topics that she feels would make a good story or a story arc. She has more topics than what are ultimately put into production, which is a good problem.
All right, because then you can cherry-pick and get the best stories. And by the way, not all the best stories lend themselves to video storytelling. There are other filters that get invoked. Once those stories are conceived, then we bring together a panel of scientists.
While I’m an astrophysicist, one of the great contributions of “Cosmos” is how seamlessly it blends traditionally separate sciences. You come through school and you have your biology book, and then your chemistry book and it’s a different teacher, and a different professor and it’s a different book.
We think of them as the stovepipe channels through nature. Of course, nature doesn’t distinguish one from the other at all. It is a complete blend. As “Cosmos” tells stories, it is a complete blend of geology and biology, and chemistry and physics and astrophysics.
Especially in this one, engineering, because we explore engineering solutions to our modern challenges. The committee comes together and explores whether the science that has been suggested in the storyline is accurate or/and might have read something on a frontier. Is that just a fringe idea or is it mainstream? Or is it just a fun idea, but there’s nothing really against like wormholes? Wormholes are real. They’re mathematically real. We just don’t know how to make one. How would you fold that into a story? You want to be honest about how unreachable it is technologically, even if you are candid about the fact that science can take you there perhaps one day. It goes through that filter.
Some stories are modified, others are removed, because they’re based on a scientific principle that has been overturned, or not sufficiently founded to base an important element of the story on. Okay, so then all of that get readjusted. Then I see the scripts, and I’m the last gate of what would occur between the script and what comes out of my mouth.
I’ll say, “Ann, this doesn’t work. Or this doesn’t make sense or this doesn’t…” and we go back. Something gets adjusted or not, or gets removed or enhanced. There are other ways… just as an example, that guy who’s an editor, it’s not just what you take out, it’s what you can add. For example, in a case where a phenomenon is being portrayed and I say, “This phenomenon is even greater than you are capturing here in the story. The explosion is more significant or it lasts longer and gives you more time to tell the story.” Adjustments had been made because the science, in fact, enabled the story to be stronger than it otherwise would have been. That’s where I come in. I’m not there at the beginning of it, I’m their sort of middle towards the end and especially at the end.
I want to add one other thing. Sorry. Yeah, sorry, just one other thing. You guys might know because you write about this stuff, but the public generally doesn’t know, I don’t think. That when you see a credit for who wrote a story that you see on television, that’s a very different kind of writing that goes on when you write a book. At the risk of stating the obvious, I write books. That’s what I do. When I’m writing a book, I’m not imagining how that would become a video. It’s living entirely in the words and sentences that I am putting to page. When you write for television or for movies, the writer is not only conceiving of words, they’re also imagining the set design.
What would happen? They’re not designing it, but they’re imagining what it could look like or should look like. That is a whole other level of creative writing than what goes on if one is simply writing a book. That’s what Ann lives and thinks visually and emotionally. As I said earlier, she’s the secret sauce that makes “Cosmos”, “Cosmos” and not just another documentary.
Host Neil deGrasse Tyson on location in Valencia, Spain on the set of Cosmos: Possible Worlds. COSMOS: POSSIBLE WORLDS premieres March 9, 2020 on National Geographic. (Dan Smith/FOX)
Mick Brady: My question concerns, you’ve mentioned of a cosmic telescope in “Cosmos.” You suggest that you wondered why we haven’t yet built one. That we could use it to view the early Voyagers setting sail thousands of years ago. I’m wondering just how much detail a cosmic telescope could provide, and how it might solve some of the planet’s big riddles and help us solve big problems that we face today like perhaps climate change. Also, what would it take to build one?
Neil deGrasse Tyson: That’s all you’re asking. The statement that “I don’t know why we haven’t built one yet,” is a simple expression of, it does not involve yet to be invented technologies. That’s all I’m communicating there. The expense could be huge. I mean, even in the billions, but the challenges, the technological and engineering challenges, and scientific challenges are not what is in our way. Hence, I get to push you a little in the direction of exploration and say, “I don’t know why we haven’t done this yet.”
The physics is working, but the technology is still a bit of science fiction. We take great pains and I hope we’ve accomplished successfully, to distinguish what is real and doable, what is real but dreamy. What is dreamy, and maybe one day in the unforeseeable future, we’ll get it done. In the moment, I don’t see how a cosmic telescope would inform our earth circumstances regarding climate change, other than to get images of distant exoplanets. You see, as long as you are just a single planet in your database, you don’t know what’s unusual or what’s common. You can’t generalize about it, because it’s the curse of the single example. A way to think about this is if you have only ever seen goldfish swimming in the water, and you try to hypothesize about what you might find if you look in other waters, you would say, “It would be small and gold-colored. Then you go in and you see other things that kind of look like a goldfish because they swim but they’re not gold. You say, “Oh,” so then you generalize beyond the goldfish single example. Then you keep looking and say, “Wait a minute, they’re crabs. There’s like coral and there’s the octopus, that doesn’t even have a spine.” Then all of a sudden, you have a broader understanding of what life is, simply by broadening your database. Right now we know other planets exist, but we have not looked down on their surface. There’s detail missing. We don’t have evidence of life elsewhere.
If we look with a cosmic telescope, then we’ll be able to have resolution sufficient for observing surface features of other planets, like we’re in orbit around earth. That is resolutions such as what we get when we’re just a few hundred miles above the earth looking down. Then we’d be able to say, “Oh, okay, there are other planets that survive it this way and not that way. This other planet has life. Look what they’ve built and looked at what they have done.” Now you can say, “Oh, now we have a new perspective on how to handle our problems here.”
That’s a way to use a cosmic telescope to address the challenges we’re facing here on earth. My first thought is, we get to see stuff we’ve never seen before. Anytime you do that, you learn. Anytime you have access to regimes of data that no one before you ever had, you learn something.
I have an obscure example. My high school girlfriend, we went to the same college, she got glasses very late, like her sophomore year of college in life. She’d always apparently had a slightly fuzzy vision at a distance, not close up, she could read and only first time got glasses in her sophomore year.
She puts them on and we’re sitting down…like walking back to the dorms and she’s noticing, “Wow, the grass has blades of grass in it.” It’s not just a green carpet, it’s actually made of things that are individually green. That she knew this intellectually, but never visually experienced it. All of a sudden, the grass became this intriguing place to probe further. That’s a simple case of your resolution increasing, bringing you into a whole other way of thinking and seeing the world. For us, it would be a whole other way of thinking about and seeing the universe. That’s a cosmic telescope for you.
Mick Brady: Wow, so if I understand you correctly, its value would be more or less in looking in great detail at earth’s history, and more in looking in greater detail at the “Cosmos” itself.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Yes, precisely.
Oh, wait, wait, just one thing. I just realized something, back to the previous…sorry to interrupt. Back to the previous question. Okay, I think I understand there is a confusion there. The confusion is, if another civilization had built a cosmic telescope, and let’s say there’re 65 million light-years from us and they look back at earth, they would see earth not as we are today, but as we were 65 million years ago.
In fact, they would witness the extinction of the dinosaurs, because that light would only just now be reaching them. They’d have the resolution to watch that happen. A cosmic telescope would never see the history of the earth because that ship sailed. That light has already passed and is on its way out into the universe. We’d be able to see the past of other civilizations that are not only in our galaxy but in other galaxies as well. Just to clarify that.
Learn more about the first episode of the season with our review of “Cosmos: Possible Worlds: Ladders to the Stars.”
Part two continued here.
Written by Colleen Bement
