Five years ago I heard a rumour filmmakers Eric Hogan and Tara Hungerford were developing a series of short space documentaries called Space Suite, and I spent a month’s worth of evenings and weekends pulling together a demo reel to pitch myself as a VFX artist for the project.
I was brought on to create a couple dozen VFX shots for the show, using NASA photographs and projection-mapping to create realistic, cinematic space scenes.
The series proved incredibly popular, airing on Knowledge Network and the following years brought about a second and third season. But when the time came to create a fourth season, I was delighted to be asked to take on a larger role in production.
This time we did two seasons back-to-back: Space Suite IV tackled everything from panspermia to black holes, and Space Suite Apollo commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
For Space Suite IV I wrote, directed and animated 7 of the 10 episodes:
Each episode had a unique style and voice:
The idea of the series was to showcase footage and images directly from NASA, but from time to time I had to create bespoke graphics for certain episodes:
I was also able to push the visual effects further this season, creating dozens of fully-3d shots thanks to the incredible After Effects plugin Orb by Video Copilot.
For Space Suite: Apollo, my colleague Catherine De Paula took point on writing and editing the episodes, but I still got to create a bunch of awesome Moon-centric VFX shots:
Working on these two seasons of Space Suite have literally been a dream come true for me, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for this series. Check out Space Suite IV and Space Suite Apollo for more information about where you can watch the series.
[…] Suite with Catherine De Paula and producers Eric Hogan and Tara Hungerford, and working to elevate the visual language of the […]