{"id":17128,"date":"2021-11-03T09:00:55","date_gmt":"2021-11-03T13:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev2.worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/worldscreen.com\/"},"modified":"2021-11-04T09:18:15","modified_gmt":"2021-11-04T13:18:15","slug":"among-the-stars-with-director-ben-turner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/among-the-stars-with-director-ben-turner\/","title":{"rendered":"Among the Stars with Director Ben Turner"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among the Stars <\/em>immerses viewers with NASA astronaut Captain Chris Cassidy as he embarks on one last mission, featuring intimate footage, personal video diaries and livestream video for a behind-the-scenes look at the engineers, flight controllers and specialists who work together to make these missions possible. The six-part series, which landed as an original on Disney+ last month, comes from Fulwell 73 Productions and was directed and executive produced by one of the company\u2019s founding partners, Ben Turner, who talks to TV Real Weekly <\/em>about the genesis of the project, his passion for all things space and his own mission to inspire through filmmaking.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always been a bit obsessed with space and wanted to make a show about it,\u201d says Turner, who explains that James Corden, a fellow partner at Fulwell 73, played a pivotal role in connecting him to Cassidy, who was interested in documenting what might be his last mission. \u201cI had just finished making Sunderland \u2018Til I Die<\/em>, a sports-access series in the mold of All or Nothing<\/em>. That method of storytelling is old-school obs-doc filmmaking, but it\u2019s packaged in a more modern way. There\u2019s a match every week, and you get to see everyone survive or fail in quite binary terms and the drama comes to a head. But if you could find ways of charting the drama, there\u2019s no reason that other teams couldn\u2019t provide such an interesting story. In my mind, the gold standard would be NASA, because those are teams of people under enormous pressure trying to do amazing things. And if a soccer game, an American football game can be that interesting, then surely stepping into space to do a mission has got to be interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Turner looked at the landscape of space documentaries, he found that they largely fell into two buckets: those heavy on the science and those that retell stories of past missions. Though he enjoys these projects himself, Turner believed that he could bring something new to the genre. \u201cNobody was doing it like a sports documentary\u2014we\u2019re going to embed with this team, we\u2019re going to get to know the people involved, we\u2019re going to get to see the stakes through their eyes and we\u2019re going to be with them as they overcome the obstacles and pull off something amazing,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you can package [the footage] in the way that we did\u2014so you know the people involved, you know the stakes, you know that they\u2019ve stressed over this particular thing that\u2019s going to be a pinch point\u2014then it really comes to life. This show stands out among lots of space docs because we\u2019ve just approached it in a slightly different way.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Turner couldn\u2019t have expected when starting to work on Among the Stars<\/em> was that it would prove a larger challenge to film on the ground than up in space. \u201cThe thing I was most worried about in the run-up to the show was how I was going to film the stuff in space, because no matter how much I begged them, they wouldn\u2019t send me,\u201d says Turner, while laughing. \u201cI was worried about how we were going to capture it with Chris on the Space Station. But I couldn\u2019t have foreseen that we were going to have a global pandemic, and NASA was going to be shut down. Because it\u2019s a government agency, there\u2019s no wiggle room. There\u2019s no way of getting in there if it’s not mission-essential\u2014as much as I argued that I was mission-critical, apparently I wasn\u2019t. That became challenging to film anything on the ground once [Chris] was up there. The space side was quite easy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crucial to the success of filming both on the ground and up in space was the teamwork of the crew behind the docuseries, and it’s the teamwork of those who make space missions possible that Turner hopes sends an important message to viewers. \u201cOne of the keys to happiness in life is to find out what shape or part of the machine you are and find a machine that you really want to work in, that gets the best out of you,\u201d says Turner. \u201cA lot of my job as a director and producer is to bring a team together who work well, who feel like we\u2019re on the way to Mordor to throw a ring into the fires. We don\u2019t need motivating because we\u2019re all loving what we\u2019re doing and that\u2019s the only way of working. That was reflected in the teams we saw with NASA. There are astronauts, but there are mission accountants, project managers, engineers, scientists. There are people of all shapes and sizes and skill sets who work together to make that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turner adds, \u201cAstronauts say they\u2019re just the tip of the iceberg, the hands of the machine. I hoped to show that whole machine working. I hope the kids watching it think, \u2018I could do that part of it, I could be a part of this because I’m really good at numbers.\u2019 Everyone is important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another message that Turner hopes viewers come away with, particularly in light of Covid-19 and ongoing political strife around the world, is how much good can come from finding solutions through constructive disagreements and collaboration. At NASA, \u201cthere\u2019s international collaboration; it\u2019s not just NASA, it\u2019s people from CERN and MIT and lots of international groups coming together, not always agreeing,\u201d says Turner. \u201cThere is plenty of disagreement when you\u2019re trying to do something that\u2019s as difficult as they\u2019re doing. Everyone\u2019s got their opinions. But to show an international collaboration of people overcoming differences and obstacles in a constructive way, I hope is inspirational in itself and meaningful in that context of what we\u2019ve all been through.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Among the Stars<\/em>, Turner had also hoped to document a significant moment at NASA and in space travel. As it happened, the docuseries chronicles \u201ca moment where we\u2019re going from astronauts and people who worked on the Space Shuttle and built the International Space Station to the time where everybody is going to space,\u201d explains Turner, noting the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission and Blue Origin. \u201cThere\u2019s a whole new energy coming to this, with private companies and civilian astronauts. We got to document the transition in a way from one era to another\u2026. It\u2019s a kind of changing of the guards from the NASA that we all fell in love with from watching the Space Shuttle to something even more exciting in the future. It was amazing to be in a position to document that transition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turner also felt fortunate to be working on the project with Disney, which offered full support to make Among the Stars<\/em> everything it could be. In pursuit of Disney\u2019s high bar, \u201cthey would support us with anything we needed, which was amazing because a lot of TV is struggling against budgets and timelines, but they were very generous and open-hearted,\u201d says Turner. \u201cI loved working with them. I\u2019m very open to learning how to sprinkle the Disney magic on my work. Creatively, they were fantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Putting together a project for a streamer like Disney+ came with the added benefits of having more freedom with episode lengths and longtail potential in terms of being found by curious viewers over time. \u201cWhen you\u2019re doing it on a network, you have a slot and that slot has its own baggage,\u201d explains Turner. \u201cIf you\u2019re in the U.K. on the BBC at 9 o\u2019clock on a Thursday night, that\u2019s a certain audience and that shapes how your show has got to be. And that\u2019s the same in America. When you make it for a streamer, it will find its audience when it\u2019s good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

When factual content like Among the Stars<\/em> finds its audience it can play a significant role in broadening viewers\u2019 understanding of the world and it can inspire, according to Turner. \u201cI have always been attracted to stories that I find inspirational,\u201d he says. \u201cIn terms of my work, it\u2019s really important to show things to people that are inspirational. You watch the news, it\u2019s quite scary at the moment. We need to face our problems honestly and understand them. But we also need to feel inspired and have the notion that people are amazing and do amazing things together.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fulwell 73 Productions’ Ben Turner on the genesis of the Disney+ docuseries Among the Stars, his passion for all things space and his mission to inspire through filmmaking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1033,"featured_media":17129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,69],"tags":[5776,5876,4324,5777],"class_list":["post-17128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-profiles","category-top-stories","tag-among-the-stars","tag-ben-turner","tag-disney","tag-fulwell-73-productions","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\nAmong the Stars with Director Ben Turner - TVREAL<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/among-the-stars-with-director-ben-turner\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Among the Stars with Director Ben Turner - TVREAL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Fulwell 73 Productions' Ben Turner on the genesis of the Disney+ docuseries Among the Stars, his passion for all things space and his mission to inspire through filmmaking.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/among-the-stars-with-director-ben-turner\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVREAL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2021-11-03T13:00:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-11-04T13:18:15+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/12\/2017\/07\/chris-cassidy-among-the-stars-disney.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"380\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Chelsea Regan\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Chelsea Regan\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/among-the-stars-with-director-ben-turner\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/among-the-stars-with-director-ben-turner\/\",\"name\":\"Among the Stars with Director Ben Turner - TVREAL\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2021-11-03T13:00:55+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-11-04T13:18:15+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/#\/schema\/person\/2a2c6d8fb3c7c8b4220b8877ecffb79a\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/among-the-stars-with-director-ben-turner\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/among-the-stars-with-director-ben-turner\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/among-the-stars-with-director-ben-turner\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Among the Stars with Director Ben Turner\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/\",\"name\":\"TVREAL\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/#\/schema\/person\/2a2c6d8fb3c7c8b4220b8877ecffb79a\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Regan\",\"description\":\"Chelsea Regan is the managing editor of World Screen. 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