Imagine a travel time of 35 minutes from Los Angles to San Francisco in a pod-like vehicle through a near-vacuum tube, at more than 760 mph. Well, the Blue Sky CGI team did just that as part of a new ground-breaking development in mass transportation. The award-winning BlueSky CGI team of Lee Waters, Rick Chou and artists brought art, design and technology together in their latest project, Hyperloop-UCI HyperXite Animation.

Hyperloop is a technology for the high-speed transportation currently being developed by SpaceX and business magnate, engineer and investor Elon Musk. The need for better infrastructure that features fast, affordable, sustainable transportation ( F.A.S.T. ) has never been greater. As part of the endeavor, SpaceX offered 27 teams from across the world to participate in the development of functional prototypes for the Hyperloop high-speed transport system. BlueSky CGI was asked by one of the top teams, University of California, Irvine, to create an animation for its UCI HyperXite Pod.

The UCI HyperXite project took about four months from start to finish. After initial visits and meetings with members at the UCI HyperXite complex, BlueSky CGI set out to draft a storyboard. “Since Hyperloop is about future transportation, we decided to make an animation with more of a conceptual approach,” says Blue Sky partner and director Rick Chou. The movie scene starts with a pod at a lab facility being loaded for launch, then enters a vacuumed tube, accelerating up to speed, traveling through a futuristic-looking city, getting up to warp speed, and finally arriving at a terminal. BlueSky wrote the storyboard and designed and created all elements in CGI as the launch facility, cities, skyline, high-speed rail and terminals.

With some basic data for the pod from the client, Blue Sky CGI team also did modeling to make the pod as real and as accurate as possible. UCI HyperXite was thrilled with the sleek, visually intriguing and cool-to-watch animation of things to come. Working closely with the HyperXite engineers, BlueSky produced the complex visuals the client wanted to see and met all challenges on structural changes on design elements, as the tricky air levitation feature, with customary flexibility and quick turnaround.

BlueSky CGI offers end-to-end solutions for print, interactive content, events and commercials with the most talented artists, retouchers and producers working today. Clients come to them for technical expertise and get the best in visual assets. BlueSky CGI— the perfect marriage of art and technology, connecting vision to reality.