Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1349602
T H E A S T R O N A U T S | P E R S P E C T I V E 4 3 When I met Dean Israelite over lunch to discuss The Astronauts, the first thing he said to me was to forget we were working on a Nickelodeon show. Dean had recently finished the acclaimed series Are You Afraid of the Dark? with them and knew that the kids network was keen to sharpen their edge somewhat. He then told me about his director of photography, Jimmy McMillan, whose catch phrase when describing the lighting was always, It's gonna be dark as shit. He later showed me a reference video for the look of the show…it was two minutes of a black screen. The showrunner and writer was Dan nauf, who's known less for children's television than for adult crime thrillers like The Blacklist or bleak dramas like Carnivale. This series was certainly starting to look a lot edgier than your average Nick show. The Astronauts is a science fiction series set twenty years in the future when space travel has become common and bases have been established on Mars and the Moon. A new mission has been planned to rendezvous with a strange interstellar asteroid near Venus. When a group of kids sneak onto the rocket with their parents' key cards, it inevitably launches early and the adventure begins. Nickelodeon had partnered up with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's company Imagine, so I knew that the science in The Astronauts would have to be anything but fictional. In order to fit in to the limited budget, the show would be written with no location work whatsoever, the kids would always be on the built sets of the Odyssey spaceship and the parents would always be in the built sets of Mission Control. Shooting in A. A QUICK PENCIL SKETCH OF THE LAUNCH TOWER BY GEOFF WALLACE TO ENABLE ILLUSTRATOR SUNIL PANT TO WORK UP THE CONCEPT FOR VFX. B. ODYSSEY LAUNCH— THIS IMAGE WAS AN AMALGAMATION OF SEVERAL SEPARATE ILLUSTRATIONS WITH WORK BY ALEX CUNNINGHAM, GEOFF WALLACE AND SUNIL PANT.