In an amazing moment of life imitating art, a team of scientists and engineers recreated a scene in Disney’s animated film “Up” where a massive bouquet of balloons lifts a house sky-high. The stunt was filmed for a new National Geographic Channel series called “How Hard Can It Be,”.
So how hard was it?
“Very difficult actually,” the show’s host, Paul Carson, said in a video clip of the launch. The team – which also included two professional balloon pilots – met before dawn Saturday on a private airfield east of Los Angeles.
The Disney / Pixar film “Up” was a wonderful experience as all animated films are, that stretches the imagination and congers up impossible feats only limited by the computer graphic team’s collective talent. After all how could a house be lifted clean off its foundations by a mass of helium balloons!
Well as is the norm in TV programmes like “Mythbusters” and “How do they do it” the team at a new reality show “How hard can it be?” set about seeing if they could lift a house in real life with helium balloons.
Well it turns out if you take 300 helium filled balloons (2.5 metre high balloons) you can lift a small house (28 m2) right up to 10,000 feet! Sadly the balloon powered house did not make it to South America and the legendary “Paradise Falls” – it managed a rather shorter one hour flight!
Video footage shows dozens of people working at the scene, including one balloon handler who barely keeps his feet on the ground as he carries a cluster to the house. ”We did it in the space of two weeks,” Carson said. “It was a moving target from day one, but we got it and I’m happy to say the house actually flew.”
It wasn’t a real house, but the floating 10-story structure was no lightweight. The yellow wooden building, copied from Disney Pixar’s 2009 film, measured 16-feet square and carried more than 600 pounds of crew and 2,000 pounds of ballast, Carson said.
It took 300 eight-foot helium-filled balloons gathered in an enormous bunch to launch the house.
In the movie, an elderly man named Carl uses balloons to transform his house into a flying contraption after his wife dies so he can fulfill the couple’s dreams of exploring South America. The real-life scene played out in nearly identical fashion with the small yellow house taking flight suspended from many multicolor balloons.
Asked what he felt after the experiment succeeded, Carson had one word: “Incredulity.”
Source: National Geographic, Disney, Various
