The Apollo program was known to be the US space project that brought humans to the moon for the first and so far only time. The program was operated by NASA between 1961 and 1972. The first manned moon landing itself took place on July 20, 1969. After five more landings, the program was discontinued in 1972, also for cost reasons. Since then, to this day, no one has set foot on the moon again.
Neil Smith apparently knows his way around NASA's Apollo program, but also has a weakness for animation software. This is how Smith brought his interests together and for the following video all 17 Apollo patches animated and he succeeded very well.
I've always thought it would be cool to animate all the mission patches from NASA's manned moon missions. So when looking for a short project to do while teaching myself a bit more about the Octane renderer for C4D, this seemed like the perfect choice. Lots of different materials, texturing techniques, etc.
Special thanks to NASA for all the super cool, high res public domain imagery, free 3D models and for going to the moon in the first place!