I’ve always had a fascination with the days of Space Race. I find it so interesting that this boom in technology eventually lead to humanity landing on the Moon.

With the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight to the stars in 2021, I wanted to create a short project based around it. I decided to depict the Vostok 1 launch, beginning in the vastness of space then traveling to the cramped Soviet bunker then back to the bright sprawling sky. The audio is archival radio recordings between mission control and Yuri Gagarin in the first few minutes of the launch.

I created an illustrated beat board for this project to show the stylistic direction I wanted to go in; specifically inspired by Herge’s artwork.

Check out the storyboards for this project here!