PULSAR FUSION
COMMERCIAL
This commercial is currently is post-production
When Create Design approached me about directing this film for Pulsar Fusion, the subject matter immediately had me. Space travel, propulsion systems, fusion technology, the possibility of travelling further and faster than we ever have before. It’s hard not to get pulled into that.
Pulsar Fusion are working in a space that feels genuinely ambitious. Not ambitious in the vague, start-up sense of the word, but in the literal sense. Rockets. Plasma. Fusion propulsion. The kind of engineering that could change how we move through space, and potentially reduce some of the enormous cost and waste involved in getting there.
But I didn’t want the film to become too obsessed with the science on its own.
The technology is obviously fascinating, but what interested me more was the people behind it. The scientists, engineers and thinkers who spend their days trying to solve problems most of us can barely understand. I wanted to look at the brains behind the innovation rather than just the innovation itself.
There’s something quite human in that. A group of people standing in a workshop, a lab or a test facility, working on something that sits somewhere between imagination and reality. It’s easy to talk about the future of mankind in broad terms, but that future is usually built by people in rooms, making decisions, testing, failing, adjusting and trying again.
That became the centre of the film for me.
Rather than treating Pulsar as a company making impressive machines, I wanted to frame them as people trying to move us towards something bigger. The machines matter, of course, but they only really become interesting when you understand the intention behind them.
Visually, I wanted the film to feel precise without becoming cold. There needed to be a sense of scale and possibility, but also a closeness to the work itself. Hands on components. Faces in concentration. The quiet focus that exists around complex engineering. Those small details felt just as important as the larger idea of space travel.
The challenge with a film like this is not to over-explain. The science is complex, and it deserves respect, but a film still has to make you feel something. My job was to help translate that world into something people could connect with, without pretending to be the expert in the room.
For me, the film was about the future, but also about the people willing to spend their present building it.
Made for Pulsar Fusion.
Agency: Create Designs.
Directed by Charles Logan Clare.