Ever wonder how Mars looks like from a spacecraft? A film maker from Finland has successfully created an amazing short film using 3-D images on Mars. These video is based on real images taken by a NASA Mars orbiter.

Jan Fröjdman was able to create and piece together this stunning short known as "A Fictive Flight Above Real Mars" with the help of imagery taken from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These high resolution images of Martian landscape was captured by the orbiter's HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera.

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The film features the Red Planet's dusty and dynamic terrain filled with 3-D tours of sprawling Martian landscapes of steep cliffs, massive craters, and uniquely shaped land formations. In addition, Fröjdman added a few effects that reminds you of the Apollo lunar missions such as crosshatches while zooming in on a landscapes and even thruster burns from the orbiter. 

A FICTIVE FLIGHT ABOVE REAL MARS from Jan Fröjdman on Vimeo.

This beautiful video takes you for a rendezvous from Martian moon Phobos, and then enter the Red Planet's tenuous atmosphere, observing the surface of Mars and then taking off again. Fröjdman's process in creating this video involved the use of 3-D anaglyph images captured by the HiRISE instrument.

These images offer a glimpse of the topography of the Red Planet's surface. The final processed images show panning video clips and transitions. Fröjdman also revealed that it took him three months to complete this remarkable work.

"This is really time consuming and I have to manually choose more than 33,000 reference points based from the anaglyph images. In addition, I used at least six different kinds of software for the entire image processing and film making process," he said.

Apart from being a filmmaker, Fröjdman is also a landscape photographer and an audiovisual artist. His goal in making this Mars 3-D tour is to simulate spaceflight above the surface of Mars and observe the different, interesting regions of the alien world.