To showcase Prada’s custom-made flight suit for Red Bull Air Race World Series winner Dario Costa, Prada commissioned Jacob Sutton to make two short films for them.

Jacob wanted to pull off some aerial shots that would be impossible in camera. He wanted to bring the camera really close to the plane, much closer than you can get with a helicopter. These shots were captured with the plane on the runway using carefully choreographed technocrane camera moves. This footage was then composited into the sky in post.

To begin, Jacob made a model of the plane out of cardboard (all the best briefs have to start somewhere), placed it on a tripod and shot the dynamic sequences he wanted with his phone. This gave us the broad strokes to choreograph and refine in the virtual studio with the 3D model of Dario’s plane, while staying roughly constrained to movements that would be possible with the crane on the runway. We knew the Red Bull Air Race plane would have to remain static so if we wanted it to roll away from camera, we had to think about what the inverse of that motion would be, and perform that with the camera instead; furthermore, owing to personnel limitations on the airfield, we had to supervise the entire shoot remotely.

Once we had the edit locked we tracked the footage of the Italian skies and positioned our plane within it. Everything was rotoscoped so that we could replace the background, including that refracted through the cockpit, with our new scenic backplate. It was shot at a very high framerate so we added all the motion blur back in, to recreate the sensation of soaring off into the sunset at high speed.