The Golden Record was a NASA project.
It was spearheaded by Carl Sagan.
NASA put a record made of gold on a spacecraft and shot it out into space.
On the record were images and sounds of planet earth.
It’s pretty incredible. Read more about it here > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record.
The Yellow Record was an ASSINIGN project.
It was spearheaded by Andrew Samuel.
He made a feature length short film and sent it out into the film industry.
- He burned the movie onto bluray discs
- Colored them yellow
- numbered them 1 to 20
- and sent them to the production companies of filmmakers (some of whom he didn’t actually admire – he made that fact clear in the letter accompanying several of the discs, that it was just a matter of their connections within the industry, not their film-making acumen)
The idea behind the project:
I had moved to New York to work in film, but the film world seemed like it was in another galaxy. I wanted to make a version of the Golden Record about me — a record of my images and sounds.
I made the video, sent Blu-Rays (numbered 1 to 20 or 30, I can’t remember) out along with a scale model of the Voyager spacecraft and…
I didn’t receive any replies, but that’s okay, because Carl Sagan didn’t either and he was still able to go on to a lucrative career as a television presenter.
Besides, the point of Sagan’s Golden Record wasn’t to actually put an open call out to aliens and/or film producers who probably would have taken advantage of me anyways, it was to make a statement about the people on earth by the people on earth, a token of of self reflection and self affirmation.
So, I made a statement about myself by myself.
And it wasn’t very good.
Here’s an abridged cut of it (about an hour and a half sped up to fit into about a minute and half):
The whole thing (in parts):
*The returned disc was also one of the discs sent out with a letter specifying that they were receiving the message not because of their skill as a filmmaker (this one in particular was sent to a mumblecore film-maker and he made his disdain for the genre clear in the letter) but because of their connections in the film industry, noting that it doesn’t do the industry as a whole any good to have mediocre film-makers who’s only skill was raising money so they should probably give actually talented outsiders with an actual vision who weren’t born with those inherent film connections a chance if he wants the film industry to survive in the long run. He received the box via return mail, but it had been opened and scale model of the Voyager spacecraft had been damaged, as seen above.