Since 2023, Purple Donut has handled post-production on the Michael Collins Trophy tribute videos for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Each film plays at a live ceremony in front of the honorees, their families, and aerospace's most significant figures. They've trusted us each year.
The Michael Collins Trophy is the National Air and Space Museum's annual recognition for individuals whose contributions to aerospace have genuinely shaped history. The audience at the live ceremony includes the honorees, their families, and some of the most consequential figures in aerospace. The video plays on a large screen in front of all of them, and the footage it draws from can span sixty years of spaceflight. Apollo-era imagery has all the characteristics of 1960s film. Recent mission footage from programs like DART comes in entirely different formats. The museum shoots the interview content themselves and hands it to us for edit. The work is making material from radically different eras read as a single, coherent piece.
Each video runs three to five minutes. For Dr. Farouk El-Baz, the 2026 lifetime achievement honoree, we pulled from original Apollo mission imagery to trace a career that helped determine where the Apollo landers would touch down. For the DART team, we cut between historical footage of early planetary defense research, 3D animation, mission control footage, and the recorded moment a spacecraft physically changed the trajectory of an asteroid.
The museum delivers interview footage once it's shot, and the clock is already running. Ceremony dates don't move. Getting all of it to feel like it belongs in the same film, not a patchwork of eras, takes deliberate work at every stage of the edit.
Before working with Purple Donut, the museum managed this post-production process separately each year. Now they have a consistent partner who knows the format, knows the stakes, and knows how to turn archival research into a finished tribute film on deadline.
These videos don't disappear when the room clears. They live on the museum's website and go out through their social channels, reaching an audience well beyond the ceremony. For honorees like Dr. El-Baz, that means a record commensurate with the career — one that will represent them long after that evening is over.
If you have a story that deserves to be told well and preserved properly, we'd like to talk.
