world travel insurance: Crane lower that rover! NASA spoof goes viral

Maggie McKee, contributor

A music-video spoof of LMFAO?s Sexy and I Know It stars NASA?s Curiosity rover, and has quickly become a viral sensation. New Scientist talks to David Hudson, the man behind We're NASA and We Know It.

Your music video about the Curiosity rover that recently landed on Mars has gone viral in the last few days, with more than a million hits on YouTube. How did it all begin?
A group of film-makers and myself, and the company I work for, Cinesaurus, decided that we wanted to start a new YouTube channel and create content each week that was topical and current. A week ago, NASA's Curiosity Mars landing was the biggest thing in the news, and we unanimously decided that was the coolest thing we wanted to make a video for, in addition to the fact that we are just huge science and space geeks.

It has a lot of realistic details - like passing around peanuts in mission control for luck. Do you have a background in space science or engineering?
I studied political science and communication. In terms of the writing, most of the knowledge we went off was personal research we gathered through our fandom of NASA. But we were lucky enough to have a former NASA employee with us for last week's production - Anne Ketola. She worked down in Houston a few years back, so she was very valuable in giving us insider information on what kind of details we should include in the video. And she brought a ton of NASA gear and swag, and that really pushed us over the edge in terms of our production value.

What sorts of tips did she give you?
She shared mannerisms of how we should act. While you are in mission control, it's very stoic, because everyone's down to business. I'm a pretty smiley person, so the stoicism was something I had to work on. It typically ended up with me outbursting and laughing.

You played Bobak Ferdowsi, flight director for the Curiosity mission, who has recently gained fame for the mohawk he sported during the landing, and you all wore light blue polo shirts like the real mission controllers. Did people know you were actors?
One of the most fun things to do is to read through YouTube comments. There were a pretty decent number of people who thought we were NASA employees, or that NASA had produced the video. People thought I was Bobak Ferdowsi, and that was funny, because he is so much more of a stud than I am. I was very flattered.

What did he think?
I had tweeted at Bobak and a few hours later he tweeted back at me - that was pretty exciting. He was a very good sport about it. He thought the video was awesome and hilarious, but he's not quite sure they could all dance like that. I told him he shouldn't kick himself too hard for the dancing because we certainly didn't land a rover on Mars.

How long did it take you to produce the video?
We started last Wednesday. Typically, each week we expect to have 10 to 12 people working on a video. We all sit down together on Wednesday night and throw out a ton of ideas and just have a huge brainstorming session, and then Thursday we do all of the writing. Friday and Saturday it's the prep work and Sunday we'll shoot. Monday and Tuesday will be editing for post-production.

That sounds exhausting!
This week has been so much fun, as exhausting as it was. It's so much of a thrill to turn around content so quickly that people will still care about it. In order to remain relevant to people on the interwebs, it's kind of what we have to do.

Will your future videos also be about science?
Technically, anything is open. But most of our interests lie in science, technology, politics and world issues. We'll probably try to stick to more high-brow humour. I don't think it's likely that you'll see us creating parody videos of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West getting married, but it's not off the table.

What sorts of videos have you done before?
The web series where a lot of us met was Job Hunters. It's about a dystopian future where college graduates are sent to an arena to fight for jobs, with a successful survival rate of about 20 per cent. It's also a way to fight overpopulation. It's kind of dark humour. We just finished our first season, and we're about to start a Kickstarter for season 2.

Is your goal to be discovered by Hollywood?
Hollywood is amazing, but being able to produce all of our content independently is really valuable to us, just to have so much creative control. My hope is to really expand my company, Cinesaurus, and continue to be able to produce the content that we love.

Well, the success of this video must be encouraging.
These past couple of days have been our personal Curiosity landing. We've all been on cloud nine.

David Hudson is a film-maker in Seattle, Washington. Weekly Satire videos can be found on YouTube.