08 Oct “In Event of Moon Disaster” Website, Supported by MIT Open Documentary Lab, Wins Emmy Award

Posted at 13:43h in News by

Cambridge, Mass. (October 8, 2021) — “In Event of Moon Disaster”, an interactive website supported by the MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) and produced by MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, was honored with the ‘Outstanding Interactive Media: Documentary’ Emmy Award at the 42nd News & Documentary Emmy Awards last week. The project is co-directed by ODL Fellow Halsey Burgund and Francesca Panetta. ODL Fellow Joshua Glick is the project’s Education Producer and developed a curriculum and learning module about media literacy and misinformation to complement the project, and former ODL Fellow Jeff Soyk undertook the project’s web UX design.

“We hope that winning what we believe to be the first Emmy for a deepfake will lead to this amazing AI-enabled technology becoming more and more recognized for its creative and educational capabilities rather than simply as a purveyor of disinformation,” says Burgund.

Burgund first connected with co-director Panetta after she gave a lecture at the Open Documentary Lab in October of 2018 when she was a Nieman Fellow and began having weekly ideation sessions. “In Event of Moon Disaster” was born from one of these. Panetta joined the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality as its XR Creative Director at the end of the fellowship in 2019. Burgund and Panetta received a Creative Media Award Grant from the Mozilla Foundation and they started production. 

The project was accepted to the 2019 IDFA DocLab, where it originally premiered in the form of a physical installation. It was also selected for installation at CPH: DOX (2019), iDocs (2019), the Tribeca Virtual Arcade at Cannes XR (2020), and Ars Electronica (2021), and has won other awards including the IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling – Special Jury Award for Creative Technology (2019). Upcoming exhibitions of the physical installation include at the new MIT Museum, which opens in 2022.

“We’re so delighted that the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences acknowledged our interactive documentary with an Emmy award. Documentaries come in all shapes and forms, and as an artist and director I’m interested in how we can push boundaries to explore new ways to engage with audiences – through hybrid storytelling as well as technologies such as AI,” says Panetta.

“In Event of Moon Disaster” showcases a “complete” deepfake (manipulated audio and video) of the U.S. President Richard M. Nixon delivering the real contingency speech written in 1969 for a scenario in which the Apollo 11 crew were unable to return from the moon. To recreate the contingency speech, the piece uses deep learning techniques to create both a synthetic voice of Nixon and to use dialogue replacement techniques to replicate the movement of Nixon’s mouth and lips. Through these sophisticated technologies, the seven-minute film shows how thoroughly convincing deepfakes can be.

“The Emmy is wonderful and well-deserved news! Halsey has been a fellow in the Lab pretty much since its start — we joke that he is a ’senior’ fellow — and Fran has been a friend of the Lab since her days at The Guardian. Both are as generous with their time and knowledge as they are generative with their ideas and creativity. Those elements sparked a brilliant project, and I’m delighted that the Open Doc Lab could offer a supportive community in the form of people, like Josh Glick and Danny Goldfield, and ideas, as the Lab continues to explore Deepfake with partners like WITNESS in the form of panels and whitepapers,” says ODL Principal Investigator William Uricchio.  

Alongside the project’s film, the website moondisaster.org (for which the Emmy was awarded) features an array of interactive and educational resources on deepfakes. Led by Burgund and Panetta, an interdisciplinary team of artists, journalists, filmmakers, designers, and computer scientists created a robust, interactive resource site where educators and media consumers can deepen their understanding of deepfakes: how they are made and how they work; their potential use and misuse; what is being done to combat them; and teaching and learning resources. 

“My collaboration with Halsey and Francesca grew out of our Open Documentary Lab conversations about ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’s pedagogical possibilities. Contributing to the team in a more official capacity, my goal was to craft an educational lens through which students and teachers could both analyze the film, and better understand our emerging media landscape. This took the form of writing articles for the website and giving interactive presentations to students. Based on a generous J-WEL grant, I also collaborated with the Center for Advanced Virtuality and Open Learning/OpenCourseWare to design a public humanities project that positioned ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’ within a broader context of media literacy. As a timely warning and artful provocation, ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’ alerts viewers to the malicious applications of synthetic media, and demonstrates how A.I.-enabled technologies can be used for the civic good,” says the project’s Education Producer Joshua Glick. 

“‘In Event of Moon Disaster’ is an exemplary lab project because it’s the result of deep relationships built over time among an interdisciplinary community of artists, technologists and scholars that enabled this project to come to fruition.  Together, they explored the creative potential of AI, the dangers, and provided valuable information to the public in accessible and creative ways,” says ODL Director Sarah Wolozin.

Project Credits

Directors: Halsey Burgund, Francesca Panetta 

Editors: Halsey Burgund, Jeff DelViscio, Francesca Panetta, Laurence Topham 

Project Supervisor: D. Fox Harrell 

Actor: Lewis D. Wheeler

Web Development: Taylor Snead, Dylan Halpern, Halsey Burgund 

Web UI Design: Ksenia Slavina, Tyler Smith 

Web UX Design: Jeff Soyk 

Technical Production: Omer Ben Ami, Dmytro Bielievtsov, Oleksandr Serdiuk 

Concept Design: Magnus Bjerg, Halsey Burgund, Francesca Panetta, Jeff Delvisio 

Senior Writer: Pakinam Amer 

Motion Graphics: Dominic Smith 

Sound Mixer: Claes Nystrom 

Supervising Sound Editor: Lukas Johnson 

Education Producer: Joshua Glick