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NASA PAO Allard Beutel
Prime has left the building. He is gone. However, we have..no it's not even a reasonable substitute...
but it is Allard Beutel, our favorite PAO, and he's going to tell us a little bit about
what NASA is doing to coordinate with the folks that are filming this. He can't tell us much,
but some of the things they are doing to work with the folks that are filming Transformers 3.
Allard: Yeah. We have what's called a Space Act, that's a fancy name for a contract.
So we have a contract with the studio to have them shoot here on Kennedy for five days so
they will be shooting all this week starting on Monday, wrapping up on Friday
They scouted dozens of locations across the center.
Different facilities.
Locations.
The pads. The shuttle runway.
Of course the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building
They narrowed that list down across months and months and months. Literally whittled
it down. In fact, they were whittling down locations up until right before they started shooting.
And kind of changing on the fly, depending on their needs.
A couple weeks before they started shooting
we had an open casting call for Kennedy employees.
Six hundred people plus came in and did extras. Whatever they asked.
Gave them headshots, talked, and there were dozens of people who were
chosen across the center.
What they tried to do was not simply just access the people with badges
they work at Kennedy and that makes sense.
More than that, Michael Bay, the director of Transformers 3 and the other two Transformers films as well,
one of the things he likes to do is have realism.
One of the ways you do that is by having people who actually work
in the business be extras, because your not teaching them
what a rocket looks like. You know what your doing when he tells the extras
"Do what you would do in a launch," they're doing exactly what they would do
in a launch. There's no direction necessary. They're just doing their natural thing.
So it obviously has a touch of realism to it.
Part of the Space Act, we also have with that,
NASA is surprisingly protective, and I think we can all understand
of the insignia of NASA. What we call "The Meatball".
That blue insignia is obviously very well
recognized and we make sure it's not being used in a way, commercially, in a bad way
In an inappropriate usage.
In this case obviously it can be seen in the movie.
In other movies sometimes, you'll notice , in other sci-fi movies you'll see they have
something that looks like NASA, but it's really not NASA. That's because
we don't have some agreement with them. In this case we have a
contract with the studio to let them shoot in our facilities,
have the NASA meatball in the background,
those kind of things.
And for us, I think it's a really important thing.
That's why when we're involved in a movie that's not space exploration, but sci-fi,
but the fact is this does give us a chance to open up our...
...what we do. The real space exploration.
Exposure to audiences that we normally wouldn't have -
through a blockbuster film. And you're talking about a world-wide audience.
It's grossed hundreds of millions of dollars in the previous films.
It's a natural fit in the sense that sci-fi and real space exploration
and it also allows us to get into the summer blockbuster
theaters and the kids see it and they say,
"You know what. I saw NASA. Hey maybe I'll check it out and really go online to NASA.GOV
and find out the real thing.
It's one of those ways we've got to reach out to audiences we wouldn't normally reach.
Now Allard, we know that you're the jaded NASA PAO,
but are you excited? Are you having a little bit of fun with this? Personally?
Oh yeah. Obviously it's a lot of work and they are putting in, the production crew,
they are putting in long hours.
They want to get lots of shots. They're here for, obviously, a very short amount of time
so they got to get all of their shooting done in this finite amount of time.
It takes a lot of personnel to support it.
But obviously, we think it's worth it.
Like I said earlier. This does get us to audiences
we don't normally reach. But it also, in this case,
it's fun. Y'know.
You've got Hollywood now on the space coast and that's pretty cool.
Thank you Allard. Have a good day!