The Astronot: An Unconventional Exploration into a Vintage Space-Age with Pennan Brae

Vancouver singer-songwriter Pennan Brae made his first feature film The Astronot after an Oregon director took a music video idea to the next level. 

“It’s like a drug, doing music videos—all the stories, a nice three or four minutes to get your point across,” says Brae, the film’s writer, star and composer. Having 20 music videos under his belt, Brae began feeling limited by the medium’s time constraints.

“So I called my friend Tim Cash in Oregon and asked if he wanted to do an hour-long music video where we have this album, and we’ll just tell a story over the album. And he says ‘That sounds like a soundtrack!’”

Together, Brae and Cash, a director with FARfromEARTH Films, created The Astronot on a grueling 30-day shoot in Bend, Oregon. 

“It’s like if Arizona and the B.C. Okanagan had a baby,” Brae says of central Oregon, where he’s always wanted to make a video. “It doesn’t look like anywhere else.”

The name of the film came from photographer Dan Jackson. 

“I told him that I wanted to make an album cover with my own astronaut suit where I’m looking up at the full moon. He suggested what would be better is if I was holding a rickety old ladder, and that that would be my own method of transportation,” says Brae. 

“I thought it was such a beautiful and romantic type of message,” says Brae. “The concept of an Astro NOT—someone who wanted to be one but couldn’t. And then I just started writing.”

Brae’s style as a filmmaker is part nostalgia, part futurism, paying hommage to his fascination with both the 1960’s and the risks of space travel captured in Ron Howard’s film Apollo 13 .

“The Sixties were such a catalyst of rebirth for fashion, art, music and photography. It holds a higher mystique because we just sort of imagine what we see in the photos,” says Brae, adding, “space is still just such an amazing topic.”

Brae utilizes the main character in the film, Danny McKovsky, to relive the nostalgic thrill of the space age— particularly landing on the moon. The film begins in 1941, with a young Danny, who has a deep love for space, following NASA’s every mission. He has a very close relationship with his father, who dies while serving in the Second World War. Danny becomes depressed and a recluse, until his love interest Sandy comes into the picture.

“Parts of [Danny] are exaggerations of myself,” says Brae. “I’m better now, but when I was younger, I would take things very personally, so I drew some elements from that.”

Even with a muse he was all too familiar with, the writing process was not as straightforward as he anticipated. Given the film’s limited resources, Brae sent several drafts to Cash, who would tell him whether the script was financially feasible to produce. The pair couldn’t afford a crew, and did everything themselves for 30 day shoot.

On the set of The Astronot (2018)

“It was exhausting! We did 22 days straight, some days 15 to 16 hours,” Brae says, grateful for what they learned in the pursuit of passion. For their first feature film, the scenes were filmed out of sequence, meaning they had to remember details of a years-long story line. “By the time we got to our second film we learned how to be efficient.” The pair have made a 10 music videos and two feature films together now.

Writing the soundtrack— a collaboration of 12 musicians, 11 songs and numerous genres— was much more organic for Brae. 

“At the time, I was playing in Vancouver with a friend Yonny from Venezuela with a really beautiful guitar. I was playing keyboard, and we would go around town doing our duet. We had done so much stuff together, we decided it would be cool to make a professional album.”

When the producer at Blue Light Studios suggested they add drums, the pair started adding more instruments to each track, creating the effect of a fully stacked band.  

“That’s how the album evolved. It was supposed to just be a stripped down duet. I had never recorded with a harp, violin or cello, this was the first time,” says Brae.

While he enjoys doing both, Brae finds making music a more therapeutic process than making films. The latter, he argues, requires more funding, more help from others and more attention to detail.  

“I’ve seen some memes of people on the first day of shoot looking all happy and enthusiastic, contrasted with the last day of shoot where they look like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. And that’s so true. You try your best,” Brae says. 

You can stream Pennan Brae’s first feature film The Astronot on Prime Video, and listen to the soundtrack on Spotify and Apple Music.