General Electric · self-initiated film · 2024

Jetstream

A jet engine, directed as a protagonist.

Play film · 0:36 · sound on

Contains flashing lights.

Brand

General Electric — self-initiated, not commissioned

My role

Idea, art direction, production

Team

3 people

Recognition

Best of Stash 2025 — Passion Projects · Behance 3D and After Effects galleries

Format

36 s brand film · 2.39:1 · 4K

Tools

Houdini · Cinema 4D · Redshift · After Effects

Year

2024

Links

Behance ↗ · Stash ↗

The idea

Most engineering visuals treat the machine as a diagram. We treated it as a protagonist.

We made the film as if General Electric had shot it in a parallel universe — engineering seen as form, not function. There's very little emotion in engineering visuals: exploded views, callouts, a slow orbit around the product.

So the brief I wrote for the team was one question: not how a jet engine works, but what it feels like to stand next to one. Airflow, heat and mechanical precision had to become the film's language.

Finding the language

Three routes. One survived.

Before animation we explored how the engine should be seen. The first two were strong frames — they just said the wrong thing.

Engine silhouette against vertical stripes

Graphic

Route A

A silhouette against op-art patterns. Bold — but the engine dissolved into the pattern and became decoration.

Studio

Route B

Clean product light. Precise, premium — and exactly the diagram we set out to avoid.

Heat

Route C · chosen

One hot disc behind a black silhouette. The engine reads as a figure against the sun — a character, not a product.

Decisions

What I held the team to.

One colour. One temperature.

Red and orange only. No blue rim lights, no cool fill — all the tension comes from heat rising and falling.

Silhouette first, detail later.

We open on the outline and hold back the internals. Detail is a reward — it arrives once the audience has met the character.

Mechanics as an organism.

A turbine opens like a flower; a gear train pulses like a heart. Every shot had to be technically true and read as something alive.

Process

From grey shade to heat.

Layout and animation were locked in grey before any lighting. Look development came last — and only on shots that had already earned their place in the edit.