Apollo 50: Go For The Moon

59 Productions asked me to animate a sequence to form part of the presentation that was projected on to the Washington Monument in July 2019.

This was to celebrate 50 years of the Apollo moon landings and, as you can imagine, it was an honour to be part of this project and most definitely the highlight of my career. The section I animated can be seen in this video from around 03:00 to 10:00. You can also see my raw render below.

Behind the scenes with 59 Productions

This behind the scenes video was created by 59 Productions to show the process and challenges that went into such a ground breaking show.

From their website: "The project was a first-of-its-kind collaboration between 59 Productions; The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum; and multi-award-winning composer Jeff Beal (House of Cards)."

Raw render composition

This is my raw render, showing the process from the rocket being assembled in the VAB to the Lunar Module detaching and making it's way to the moon.

The rocket model was purchased from Turbosquid and was only available in LWO format (Lightwave), so I had good fun converting that to something usable in 3DS Max (!). Phoenix FD was used for gas / smoke simulations (with help from the excellent Redefine FX) and the entire sequence was rendered using Corona and comped in After Effects. The final resolution was 910 x 8148px.

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