Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1196709
rather than a bubble of stars. ther fi lms with fi ctional ASA logos, including Interstellar and Life, have taken a similar approach, but where those fi lms were set in the near future, this one was very much set in 2006-2007. Furthermore, most of the scenes in the movie took place in and around Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers, where the NASA logo is ubiquitous. And fi nally, the main characters, astronauts portrayed by Natalie Portman, Jon Hamm and Zazie Beetz, spend a lot of screen time wearing coveralls and spacesuits covered with mission patches. That ruled out the strategy employed by fi lms like Gravity and Ad Astra, which just pretended that the ASA logo didn't exist. For this fi lm, a ASA logo has to be created that the production would be proud of, or at least not embarrassed to show, sixteen feet in diameter on the oor of a hangar. A graphic combination of the meatball and worm was settled on…blue sphere, red orbit, and type vaguely reminiscent of the wormy NASA font. To see how it would look, I did a quick SketchUp version of a 3D wall logo at the JSC location. With just a few tweaks, director Noah Hawley and Fox Searchlight were on board. While touring Johnson Space Center in Houston, Stefania had taken photos of mission patches…lots of mission patches…covering walls, lockers and just about every other at surface. Since the use of real mission patches was not allowed, my task for the next several months was to make fake mission patches for these fi ctional shuttle missions, using the names of the fi lming crew to fi ll in for astronauts. The patch design Stefania chose for Natalie Portman's hero mission patch was loosely based on the space shuttle program patch, and the "astronaut" names included several scripted characters, as well as members of the Art Department. I fi gured the latter would eventually be replaced by friends and/or childhood pets of the producers, but to our surprise, the director said he didn't really care what names were used, and Fox Searchlight determined that there were never any NASA astronauts with the names Avila, Rowley, Mandel or Moses. (Unfortunately for concept artist Jim Martin, there actually had been an astronaut named Martin.) A. SOME OF THE FICTIONAL MISSION LOGOS THAT APPEARED AS PLAQUES IN THE NBL SET. B. NBL SIGN. A BANNER TO COVER A WINDOW ON LOCATION. 10' WIDE X 5'-6" HIGH, CREATED IN ILLUSTRATOR AND PRINTED ON BANNER MATERIAL BY UNIVERSAL SIGN SHOP. C. NASA BOWLING LEAGUE PATCH. B A C