Virgin Galactic
A travel advertisement
A travel ad for the company Virgin Galactic, which offers commercial tourist flights to space. This was a school project created for my Capstone Design class, but all the information is entirely factual. The only thing not real is the logo, which I redesigned for this project.
Screencaps
Process
I started with the logo first, because I wanted it to drive the style of the other graphics of the video as a whole. I knew I wanted a retro feel and I already wasn't very fond of the actual Virgin Galactic logo, so I set about redesigning it.
The original logo featured a large circular eye and this shape is repeated on all their ships and even in the design of their spaceport, so I wanted to keep a circular shape as a reference to that. Additionally, circles represent growth, change, safety and solidarity, attributes that apply to Virgin Galactic.
The original logo featured a large circular eye and this shape is repeated on all their ships and even in the design of their spaceport, so I wanted to keep a circular shape as a reference to that. Additionally, circles represent growth, change, safety and solidarity, attributes that apply to Virgin Galactic.
From the beginning I wanted to have a spaceship somewhere in the logo, as spaceflight is exactly what Virgin Galactic is offering. A lot of space related logos I looked at had some sort of ambiguous swoop meant to represent the curvature of the earth or the future or something, so I tried to avoid that.
I did like the idea of incorporating the earth somehow. A couple designs I had included a depiction of the earth, but overall it was too busy. I eventually realized that just having a circular shape referenced the shape of the earth. Having the words of the logo wrap around reinforces that.
The shapeship in the logo is derived from Virgin Galactic's craft SpaceShip Two (though simplified). The four stars is a reference to the company being formed in 2004.
The shapeship in the logo is derived from Virgin Galactic's craft SpaceShip Two (though simplified). The four stars is a reference to the company being formed in 2004.
Final Logo
Early on I had entertained the idea of turning the video into a fantasy travel ad where there are regular flights to the moon and to space colonies. However, ultimately I wanted to keep it as real-world as possible so I left the storyline as just the actual flight that Virgin Galactic offers now.
It was also originally going to be only 30 seconds, but the information I wanted to include ended up taking more time and it ballooned to a 1:30 instead. And that was after cutting some parts that I wanted to include, such as technical information about the spaceship.
The storyline evolved from the storyboard stage as I created it in After Effects, between what looked better and what was possible to complete in the time I had to finish this project.
All the graphics were created digitally based on my own sketches and images provided by Virgin Galactic. The design of the spaceship and spaceport are based off their real Virgin Galactic counterparts, though simplified.
Since Virgin Galactic provides few images of sufficient quality of their ship, SpaceShip Two, I created a quick 3D model that I could easy rotate to any angle to get what I needed for graphics. It was only ever intended to be a base for 2D vector graphics so there was no need to make it very detailed or get the dimensions exactly right.
