CASE 01 — 2023
BRAND / CONTENT / FILM
U.S. Air Force Lt Col Blair Thompson is curious. Curious about space. His wonderment about the giant void above our heads has led to algorithms used by SpaceX and NASA.
Film · Watch on YouTube · Video by Master Sgt. Mari Moxley · Reserve National Security Space Institute
U.S. Air Force Lt Col Blair Thompson is curious about space. His wonderment about the giant void above our heads led to algorithms used by SpaceX and NASA. Now that curiosity is reaching the next generation of space pioneers. “Space for Curiosity” is the brand-film series developed with the US Space Force and US Air Force around that thesis — institutional capability as the visible end of personal curiosity.
Defense and space recruitment has a stamp problem — institutional, hierarchical, removed from civilian life. The series needed to communicate scale and capability without inheriting the cold recruitment-poster aesthetic. The work had to read as documentary, not as marketing.
The series’ organizing principle: every subject talks about what they are personally curious about, and the institutional work emerges from that curiosity — not the reverse. Lt Col Thompson’s relationship to "the giant void above our heads" preceded, and made legible, his work on the algorithms SpaceX and NASA depend on.
Each piece opens on the subject’s home or office, in their own words, before any uniform or facility appears. The framing shifts only when their work demands it — moving from kitchen table to cockpit to mission control as the story earns each setting. The transition is the point.
Sound design ran sparse — room tone, hand sounds, occasional aircraft. No swelling strings, no patriotic music bed. The pieces paced at 3–5 minutes each, edited like documentary, not like commercial. Restraint signalled credibility.
No call-to-action ever appears on screen. Each piece ends with the subject still talking. The institutional logos appear only in the credits. The brand argument is made by the company kept, not by the framing.
The series shipped as a multi-piece campaign deployed through official Space Force and Air Force channels and used for external communications.