Customer
Frazer-Nash Consulting
Solution
Cinematic Animation
Timeline
6 Weeks
Budget
£22.5k
| The customer
The Client
Frazer-Nash Consulting is a leading systems engineering firm known for solving complex challenges across aerospace, defence, and national infrastructure.
Frazer-Nash is leading the INVICTUS programme, which is developing a comprehensive concept design for a vehicle and its integrated systems, with the goal of building and flying a Mach 5-capable aircraft at the edge of space by early 2031.
| The mission
The Mission
The objective was to produce a cinematic launch animation that visualises the maiden flight of the INVICTUS hypersonic space plane for its reveal at the UK Space Conference in 2025. The goal was to inspire and excite the UK space community to support the funding and development of this innovative technology.
Services
Concept · Modelling · Texturing · Animating · Lighting · Rendering · Editing · Sound Design
| The Brief
The Challenge
01
“We want a “Wow” visualisation of INVICTUS to drive interest and understanding of what the programme could achieve for the UK economy” – FNC Project Team
02
With only 6 weeks to produce a 1minute cinematic animation with several highly detailed scenes, we’d have to sculpt a montage of very specific shots that took the viewer on an exciting journey from hangar to near-space with exhilarating speed.
03
You could say we had a “need for speed”… So we drew inspiration from the opening scene of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, where Maverick pilots the SR-72 (coincidentally named the Darkstar) on a test flight to reach Mach 10.
04
Our animation begins in the pre-dawn “blue hour” to build tension, following the INVICTUS as it breaks through cloud cover into the morning sun, a visual metaphor for a new era of this hypersonic technology.
The UK’s history with hypersonic flight is a narrative of “what could have been.”
Following the legacy of the Skylon project, which struggled to gain the momentum it deserved, Frazer-Nash knew that this time they had to do something different.
They had to excite the UK space community with an inspirational yet realistic visualisation of the INVICTUS succeeding, knowing that seeing is believing, and believing brings support.
They had six weeks until the UK Space Conference and having never worked with an animation studio, the FNC team needed a capable partner with aerospace experience to lead the mission.
The team at Dark Star Labs specialises in space and aerospace visualisations. We work with CAD and visual references to build photorealistic assets and VFX.
| Our Approach
The Solution
After discussing the Invictus project and seeing the passion of the team behind it, we knew exactly what direction to take.
Animation
We grounded the animation in reality by using realistic camera placement and physics, and building a digital replica of Campbeltown Airport (a former NASA emergency landing site), to make the sequence feel like a documentary of a successful test flight rather than a digital render.
| Mission Footage
The Assets
Hangar
Runway
“The DSL team couldn’t have done a better job, seeing it develop along the way has been awesome and you’ve been super quick to respond to our changes. The gold video is better and more professional than I thought we’d be able to achieve, and it’s given the technical team on this end something to really rally around through the on-going design work.”
Frazer-NashConsulting Project Team Member
| Ready to Launch
IS YOUR TECHNOLOGY READY FOR ITS MAIDEN FLIGHT?
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