Purdue releases its first short film: ‘Boilers to Mars’
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowTwenty-seven Purdue University Boilermakers have gone out of this world and into outer space. To build on its reputation as the “Cradle of Astronauts,” Purdue has created its first short film.
“Boilers to Mars” follows the academic and professional careers of four fictional Purdue students who meet as first-year undergraduates and are ultimately part of a historic first mission to Mars.
“We firmly believe that when we make it to Mars, a Boilermaker will be in the lead. We decided to bring that heroic vision to life in the form of a short film,” Kelly Hiller, Purdue’s vice president of marketing, told Inside INdiana Business. “All the characters in the film are based on real students, faculty [and] alumni [who are] working in the area of space exploration and making an impact now.”
At the film’s West Lafayette campus debut, planetary science professor Briony Horgan and agriculture and biological science professor Marshall Porterfield participated in a panel discussion.
“Both of them were emotional when they viewed the film because they could see themselves in it and kind of like their dreams when they were growing up and their past as they went to college,” Hiller said.
Horgan is currently working on a project that’s tracking a rover on Mars and collecting samples in order to learn what makes up the planet’s surface. Porterfield’s research is focused on how food and plants could grow on Mars.
Hiller says the film also aims to show viewers that it will take a variety of careers to achieve the possibility of going to Mars.
“We kind of feature your traditional astronaut and we also bring in the agricultural aspects, the business [and] political science aspects that all come into play in the area of getting to Mars and what that’s going to look like. It’s going to take a lot of different disciplines to make that happen, and all of those individuals working together,” Hiller said. “There’s more than just astronauts that are involved in space exploration. You have to have communications, you have to have engineers, you have to have business.”
“Boilers to Mars” is a 10 minute film that is available online.