Director Stephen V. Stone used more than 7.5 million photographs and numerous film techniques to create the effect of flying through space around Saturn and among its rings.

While listening to the Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber one day in 2006, Stone conceived the idea of creating moving images of Saturn based on a pan-and-scan 2.5-D effect they had seen in the 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture.

After having success with a black-and-white HD animation of Saturn images from the Cassini mission based on The Kid Stays in the Picture effect, Stone wrote a script for a 12-minute film about why space should be explored.

James Hyder, editor of the large film format journal LF Examiner, learned about Stone's project and told them it belonged on the giant screen.

They was unable to create a script using narration in classic documentary format that was able to express what they felt the images were conveying.

An avid fan of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick, Stone finally found their moment of clarity during their annual viewing of that movie in 2009.

The film's advisors include Dr. Steve Danford, retired associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Dr. Michael J. Malaska, technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; author and space journalist Andrew Chaikin; and NASA Solar System Ambassadors Tony Rice and Jonathan Ward.

Although The Kid Stays in the Picture effect had opened the door to inventive ways of manipulating photographs, Stone did not find it robust enough to tackle Saturn's rings.

They experimented with dozens of other techniques both old and new, including the "Bullet Time" effect (e.g. as seen in The Matrix films), which employs multiple still cameras to create variable speeds of motion.

Many of these images of stars and galaxies were taken from camera locations much closer to Earth, during the crewed Apollo missions and by the Hubble Space Telescope.

[15] NASA named the clip its Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on March 15 and it was featured on Discovery Canada's Daily Planet television series.

On July 1, 2017, filmmaker Stephen V. Stone announced on the official website[20] and via a Facebook Live[21] video the world premiere date of May 4, 2018, with locations to be determined.

In late 2017, Canadian singer Bryan Adams released a music video[26] making extensive use of footage from In Saturn's Rings.