Team brings Up’s floating house to life
In an inspired example of life imitating art (to perfection, we may add) the National Geographic Channel, two balloon pilots and a team of scientists and engineers have successfully created a floating house just like the one in Pixar’s 2009 CGI-animated movie Up.
The 5m x 5m house, propelled by 300 weather balloons, was launched on March 5 at a private airfield in Los Angeles.
It reached an altitude of over 3000 metres and flew for almost an hour – meaning that the pilots could have watched almost 65 per cent of the film Up while in the floating house. That would have been truly poetic.
This world record breaking event was filmed as part of a new National Geographic Channel series named How Hard Can it Be? Well, in this case, the answer is pretty damn hard.
Up won the Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score awards at the 82nd Academy Awards in March 2010.
We just can't wait until these guys come up with a real-life version of Back to the Future's DeLorean time machine.
