By Flying Scooter Productions
The first half of 2026 has been one of our most active yet — new streaming launches, client work spanning industries and continents, a growing studio team, and recognition that reflects years of doing work we actually believe in. Here’s what we’ve been up to.
The Ocean – Five Years Is Coming to Apple TV and Amazon Prime — June 8
We’ve had some big milestones for this film, and this one is worth stopping for.
The Ocean – Five Years — our short documentary about grief, music, and the McCutcheon family’s five-year journey from loss to healing — launches on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video on June 8, 2026.
The film is already streaming nationally on PBS Passport following its broadcast premiere on WQED Pittsburgh last July. Now, for the first time, it will be available to the widest possible audience — anyone, anywhere, on the platforms they already use.
The Ocean – Five Years follows Brett McCutcheon, a young Pittsburgh percussionist who lost his older brother Ryan in a car accident in 2017. Five years later, Brett turned that grief into an orchestral pop EP — written with vocalist June Bracken, recorded with members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and The Voice finalist Chris Jamison. Director Jennifer Schlieper structured the documentary around that album, letting the music do what music does: carry what words can’t.
“The Ocean – Five Years touched us deeply. So many people shared that, for the first time, they felt truly seen — like someone had finally captured the quiet, complicated, and ongoing nature of grief.”
— Christine Roe, President, Board of Directors, Bereaved Parents of the USA
Stream it on PBS Passport HERE, or find it on Apple TV and Amazon Prime beginning June 8.
The Festival Run: A Film That Traveled
Before the streaming launch, The Ocean – Five Years spent more than a year on the international festival circuit.
Ten festivals. Two Oscar-qualifying festival berths at the Cleveland International Film Festival and Cordillera International Film Festival.
A win for Best Documentary at the Vienna Independent Film Festival and an Audience Award for Best Documentary Short at the Pittsburgh Shorts & Script Competition.
This is a film that earned its place everywhere it went.
The Awards: Two Golds and a Silver
The Telly Awards draw nearly 14,000 entries annually from across 55 countries. Gold and Silver are reserved for the best in class — and this season, Flying Scooter came home with three.
The Ocean – Five Years earned two Gold Telly Awards, in the Documentary and Kids & Family categories.
Our short-form documentary Turning Moments Into Memories for 95 Years — created for Turner’s Dairy to mark their 95th year in business — earned a Silver Telly for branded film. More on that work below.
Gold at the Tellys is not participation hardware. It means the work stood up against the best production companies on the planet and came out on top.
Flying Scooter Productions has now earned 17 Telly Awards across our body of work, alongside 7 Emmy nominations, a PRSA Silver Anvil, a Clio Award, and 4 Anthem Awards. We’ve been building this since 2017.
Beauty: SeroVital
If you’re a brand looking to build content around a product — content that moves, converts, and builds a real relationship with your audience — this is what that looks like.
For SeroVital, a nationally distributed beauty and wellness brand, we developed and produced a sustained content strategy built around their audience: smart, discerning women who don’t respond to generic lifestyle filler. No soft-focus platitudes. Real storytelling, real results.
Beauty content is one of the most competitive categories in branded film. The difference between content that performs and content that disappears is whether it’s built on strategy or built on trend. We build on strategy.
Aviation: Pittsburgh International Airport
This project required something rare: the ability to hold a sensitive subject with care while producing at real scale.
For Pittsburgh International Airport, we produced a mental health awareness series featuring more than 50 individuals from across the Pittsburgh region — employees, community members, voices from all walks of life — sharing their stories honestly and without clinical distance. The result is a series that doesn’t look or feel like corporate content, because it isn’t. It’s community storytelling with institutional backing. Watch the PIT STOP series HERE.
Dairy Industry: Turner’s Dairy — Turning Moments Into Memories For 95 Years
We’ve been working with Turner’s Dairy for three years. In that time, we’ve produced a few commercials and a short-form documentary. The documentary, Turning Moments Into Memories for 95 Years, earned a Silver Telly and tells a story that has been a long time in the making.
Turner’s recently marked 95 years in business — nearly a century of showing up for this region. The film doesn’t just celebrate that longevity. It captures what drives it: a deep and genuine commitment to the community they serve.
Turning Moments Into Memories traces Turner’s heritage while making clear what they stand for today — their partnerships with local and regional farmers, their place within the broader dairy community, their relationship with regional institutions like Eat’n Park, and their dedication to nourishing children, hospital patients, and people in need throughout the Pittsburgh region. It’s a brand story, yes. But it’s also a community story, and it required the same approach we bring to documentary film: go deeper than the surface, find the people, tell the truth.
The commercial — a distillation of that same story — was cut from the same cloth.
If your brand has been around long enough to have a real history, that history is one of your most powerful assets. We know how to bring it to screen. Watch Turning Moments Into Memories for 95 Years HERE.
Manufacturing & Construction: Bracalente Manufacturing and S&B USA
Our manufacturing and construction practice is one of the most active in the studio. These are the clients that require a production partner who understands industrial culture, respects the people doing the work, and knows how to translate precision and scale into content that actually resonates.
Bracalente Manufacturing marked their 75th anniversary in 2026 — and we were there for all of it. We produced a documentary and full event production to honor the occasion: 75 years of precision manufacturing, the people who built it, and the legacy that continues. Our work with Bracalente extends beyond the anniversary. We’re part of their ongoing brand journey, and that relationship reflects something we value — showing up not just for milestones, but for the long game. Watch The History of Bracalente Manufacturing Group HERE.
S&B USA is part of the infrastructure that holds this country together. Their work on highways and bridges continues to expand nationally, and we are proud to be part of their crew in the way that matters most to us: helping tell the story of what they build, and why it matters. As S&B USA grows their reach across the United States, we grow with them.
Tourism: Visit Pittsburgh
For Visit Pittsburgh, we produced a film in support of the launch of their new campaign — work designed to introduce Pittsburgh to audiences who haven’t found it yet, and remind the ones who have why they stayed.
Pittsburgh is one of the most genuinely interesting cities in America. We’ve always believed that. Making the case for it on camera is one of our favorite assignments.
New Faces in the Studio
Three new interns have joined the Flying Scooter team this season:
- Kate Pyckowski – University of Miami
- Sadie Shelkey – Boston University
- Arda Wuyts – Graduate of Penn State University
They bring fresh perspective into a studio that believes in developing the next generation of Pittsburgh filmmakers and content producers. We’re glad to have them here.
And One More Thing
In whatever spare time exists around all of the above, we’ve been quietly filming something we’re not ready to announce yet. It’s coming. Stay tuned.
Flying Scooter Productions is a certified Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE) and Emmy-nominated film and branding studio based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. To commission a film or start a conversation about your brand’s content strategy, visit flyingscooterproductions.com or reach us at marketing@flyingscooterproductions.com.