Abigail Fraeman is a deputy project scientist at the Mars Science Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she is an integral part of the team that sends rovers to the Red Planet and tracks the data the devices send back. Her association with the program started in high school when she took part in an outreach program that brought her to JPL, where she witnessed the rover Opportunity land on Mars in 2004.

But as intimately involved as she is with the Mars project, Fraeman has only ever been able to see the photos and data generated by Opportunity and twin Spirit, not the bigger picture of the rovers going about their daily business. That changed with “Good Night Oppy,” Ryan White’s dazzling new documentary opening in select theaters Friday, Nov. 4, as the effects artists at Industrial Light and Magic and sound designer Mark Mangini re-created the twin rovers at work.

The film “gave me so many feels,” Fraeman told The Chronicle in a recent video interview. “There was a remarkable feeling of watching these incredible animations of what the rovers actually look like on Mars. … We never actually saw the rovers driving around on the surface.

“On top of the design, it was also the feeling that Spirit and Opportunity were kind of a manifestation of ourselves on the surface of Mars,” she added. “You know, we saw Mars through those eyes. We put our nose in the dirt and looked at really close details in the rock through the camera at the end of Oppy’s arms. These were our proxy explorers, seeing the surface of Mars as we would if we were there ourselves.”

Producer Brandon Carroll recruited White to direct “Good Night Oppy.” The documentarian, whose films have included “Good Ol’ Freda” about the Beatles’ secretary and the Ruth Westheimer biography “Ask Dr. Ruth,” is a self-described “space nerd.” “E.T.” was his favorite film growing up, and he loves space movies, both documentaries and fiction. In fifth grade, he did a project about astronaut Alan Shepard. He had followed the Mars mission from afar.

But White admitted that the sense of wonder and awe that sustained him as a child had begun to disappear as he became steeped in the world of reality and nonfiction filmmaking. Then Carroll pitched him the story of these rovers that were supposed to perform for only 90 days, but instead became real-life Energizer bunnies, going and going and going for years on their interplanetary mission.

“The film was a unique but fun opportunity to restore that inner child in a way, and get back to that world of imagination and discovery and adventure that you have as a kid,” White told The Chronicle in a separate video interview.

White’s conversations with those involved with the rover project over the years, including Fraeman and the rover project’s principal scientist Steven Squyres, along with NASA behind-the-scenes footage of the scientists and engineers at work, reveals the human aspect of scientific endeavor. No one in the film talks about the 5-foot-2 robots as machines. Instead, Spirit and “Oppy” — both “female” — are described in anthropomorphic terms as living beings with personalities of their own.

To bring the rovers to life as well as the conditions on Mars, White turned to ILM. The Bay Area-based Oscar-winning company excels at building outer-space worlds, going back to the original 1977 “Star Wars.” White was asking for something different, to build not an imaginary world but a real one.

“It was a dream getting to work with George Lucas’ company to bring a photo-real authentic Mars to life,” White said. “The bar on this film was really high because what we were asking them to do was build a world based on the actual hundreds of thousands of photos that Spirit and Opportunity took, and also those from the orbiters that fly above Mars, photographing those missions.”

视觉效果总监伊万布斯克茨,”好Night Oppy” presented an unusual opportunity. Normally, when he and his team join a project, the script and shots are locked in place. With “Oppy,” White was still in the early stages of production. He had some storyboards, and there were shots he knew he wanted, but the situation was fluid and he was open to suggestions on how to best tell the rovers’ story.

“This was all kind of pure creation, and I really enjoyed the collaboration,” Busquets told The Chronicle. “For me, it was a different experience to be part of the storytelling aspect, instead of just the visuals. That was a lot of fun.”

Busquets and his crew faced a few challenges in bringing the adventures of Spirit and Opportunity on Mars to life. Among them was how to translate the data they were working with into the realistic images the film required. Another was injecting the rovers with the sense of being somehow alive.

“There is a little bit of reverse engineering on our end in terms of how we take the data and turn it into something that could plausibly be what a camera would have photographed in that space,” Busquets said. “Like when the rovers are analyzing rocks, we get the data of the composition of that rock but not the color.

“Ryan always had the idea in mind that he wanted the rovers to emote somehow, but it should not be a drama about the rovers,” he added. “He wanted the rovers to mirror the emotions of the crew at JPL.”

As “Good Night Oppy” screened first at the Telluride Film Festival and then at the Toronto International Film Festival, one thing White kept hearing from audiences was that Spirit and Opportunity’s story made them weep.

“Everyone says they weren’t expecting to,” he said. “The biggest surprise of the film (for me) was how emotional the scientists and engineers were, many of them describing them like a child. The more we talked to the humans, the more we realized how emotional a film this could be.”

“晚安Oppy”(PG) opens in Bay Area theaters Friday, Nov. 4, and begins streaming on Prime Video on Nov. 23.