An Emmy Award-winning documentary about University of Colorado at Boulder students who contributed to a NASA space mission to Pluto will be screened at an upcoming film festival in Turkey.
Organizers of the annual Eskisehir International Film Festival at Anadolu University will screen "Destination: Pluto and Beyond," which was produced by three former CU-Boulder journalism school students.
Festival organizers also have invited a group of journalism scholars to the event, which will take place May 5-15 in one of Turkey's oldest cities.
"Every year they select a partner university to bring students and professors to participate in seminars and talk about film," said Marguerite Moritz, a journalism professor who teaches the history of documentary filmmaking.
Moritz, the UNESCO chair of international journalism education and producer of the documentary "Covering Columbine," will attend this year's festival along with two CU-Boulder graduate students.
The alumni who produced the Pluto documentary, David Tauchen, Nathan Gang and Nick Ernst, will not attend due to job commitments.
The trio's documentary focuses on a team of CU-Boulder students at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, who built an instrument to monitor the density of dust grains. The instrument currently is on board NASA's New Horizons Mission spacecraft as it journeys toward Pluto and beyond. Considered the building blocks of the solar system's planets, dust particles are of high interest to researchers trying to unlock age-old space mysteries.
No spacecraft has ever reached Pluto, which has been downgraded to a "dwarf planet" since New Horizons was launched from Florida's Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 19, 2006. The space probe is expected to approach Pluto in the summer of 2015 for an in-depth study of the distant orb and its moons.
Tauchen, who graduated in December, is now a general assignment and education reporter for KGAN, a CBS affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He produced the Pluto documentary after pitching it to CU-Boulder adjunct Professor Tony Perri and his classmates once he had heard about the LASP project.
"I just thought it was really neat that some CU students were part of a project that would go down in the history books," Tauchen said. "We kind of just fell in love with the idea of this story. We thought we'd do a documentary for this course and that would be the end of it."
In fact, it was just the beginning. In October 2006, the documentary won the National Television Academy's Heartland Chapter student achievement Emmy, beating out two other films. The most valuable lessons the trio learned during the experience included storytelling, teamwork and project completion, Tauchen said.
Having an Emmy on their résumés hasn't hurt, either.
"I hope to win another Emmy that's not in the student category," Tauchen said. "That may be a little ways off. It was a huge honor to go to the awards ceremony and to be with professionals in my field and to be recognized by the industry. It was definitely the punctuation mark on my college career."
To watch "Destination: To Pluto and Beyond" go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=nes3cAh8_DI.
For more information about CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, visit lasp.colorado.edu/ and www.colorado.edu/journalism/.