Science Finally Shoots Its First Movie on a Cloud

One cloudy night, over the city of Nottingham, a green man on a horse skirted across the sky. The piece was part of a collaboration of artists and scientists joining forces to create a zoopraxiscope on steroids, which projected a moving image of a galloping horse.

The zoopraxiscope is simply described as a rotating disk of still images that simulates motion when rotated and projected on a screen. Artist Dave Lynch, scientist Mike Nix, and maker Aaron Nielsen combined forces to upgrade this analog concept from the early age of cinema with laser technology for it to be strong enough to project a man riding a horse in the clouds. The collaboration is called Project Nimbus.

The laser projector which took its stand on a plane while the team searched for the perfect cloud conditions in order to project their movie. To the passengers on the plane, the image looked like a green man on horseback, riding across the clouds. To onlookers below, however, it probably looked like a storm in the distance. The result is quite ghostly, like a piece of tech out of Scooby-Doo.