Film festival showcases movies made from space sounds

Alien may have told you "In space no one can hear you scream" but it was wrong! - The Space Sound Effects (SSFX) Short-Film Festival , presented by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), has challenged independent filmmakers from around the world to create short-films incorporating a series of strange sounds from space recorded by satellites. The result is a collection of films, spanning a wide array of topics and genres, connected only by these sounds. The festival, on 2 September at Rich Mix in Shoreditch, will showcase these highly creative works, present awards for the best films and will hear from the filmmakers involved and festival judges in panel discussions featuring audience Q&A. Dr Martin Archer, festival director and space physicist at QMUL's School of Physics and Astronomy, said: "I have been blown away by how the filmmaking community have taken to incorporating these sounds - which form part of my research as a space physicist - into their work. All of the submissions have been so very different, it's made the judging process very difficult indeed." - How the sounds are heard. Conventional wisdom usually states that space is a vacuum and therefore sound, which requires a medium to travel in, cannot exist. But space is not a true vacuum, it's actually filled with very weak plasma, a different state of matter made of charged particles.