We were excited to have worked on the many historical airplanes and locations this unique production required. With the aid of external advisors, our team focussed on the creation of countless complex airplane assets that Fokker designed and created between 1924 and 1939.

Turbulent Skies ('Vliegende Hollanders') is an epic Dutch tv-series about the early days of Dutch civil aviation. Idealist Albert Plesman and opportunist Anthony Fokker are inextricably bound together. During the interwar period and despite their differences, they pull off setting up civil aviation in the Netherlands, when the world is heading for a new war.

The series combines real archive footage with newly shot footage. It is like old pictures come to life and make you feel you were there…

For this leader, we worked together with the editor of Vliegende Hollanders Peter Alderliesten NCE. Peter selected and edited all the footage. Planet X Title Design added the look and feel and created the typography and main title for the show.

For international broadcasting, the title “Turbulent Skies” is used. We translated the original main title design to this international version. (FYI The literal translation of “Vliegende Hollanders” is “Flying Dutchmen”)

One of the main challenges on Turbulent Skies (Vliegende Hollanders) was animating the numerous aircraft featured throughout the series. With so many planes to depict, manually animating each one in full detail simply wasn’t feasible within the available man hours. This led to an extensive R&D phase focused on finding the most efficient way to handle the animation workload.

The solution was automated rigs.

These rigs allowed us to animate flight paths independently, with all secondary motion such as banking, tilting, ailerons, elevators, rudders and even suspension automatically responding to any adjustments. A change to the trajectory no longer required reworking dozens of animation curves, which significantly sped up the process while maintaining realism.