Brandon Sugiyama - The Age of Aerospace

This is the trailer for The Age of Aerospace. You can watch the entire documentary series online here: theageofaerospace.com

During this sequence about the revolutionary design of the B-17 bomber, I wanted to bring the audience into the mind of engineering genius Ed Wells. Having joined Boeing at the age of 21, Wells spearheaded the design of the B-17. I wanted to bring his original sketches to life and show what might have been going on inside Wells' head as he sat at his drafting table.

Using several references of maps from the era, I reconstructed the Pan American Airways system map for this sequence on the every growing and expanding empire of aviation entrepreneur Juan Trippe.

How do you seamlessly mix original illustrations from different sources with 3D models and modern rendering and compositing? This was the design challenge for this sequence about the enormous engineering hurdles facing the development of the Saturn V. It was very important to retain the integrity of the source material and blending in modern elements in a way that felt natural.

We had access to many scanned sketches by Werhner Von Braun, a former German WWII rocket scientist, who is credited with leading the development of the Saturn V which would take the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Though his work in Germany was for the military, his childhood sketches showed that he had imagined sending humans into space from a young age.

Some were unfinished and some were quite detailed. I wanted to imagine what Von Braun's sketchbook might have looked like as he sat at his desk dreaming of space travel.

There was an enormous amount of technical documents availalbe to the film making team, including the complete flight manual for the original Saturn V! These very complex mechanisms are presented with a beautiful simplicity in many of the schematic diagrams. I attempted to portray this balance of complexity/simplicity during this segment about the many individual parts that make up the much larger systems of the Saturn V,

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