Inversion, Arc
Inversion builds Arc, a re-entry vehicle that can carry cargo to orbit and bring it back to a precise point on Earth. Throttle Media produced the film; we designed and animated the screens inside it.
The brief was clarity at speed. A viewer has to understand where the vehicle is, what it’s doing and where it’s going without reading a caption, so the system is built from three views that repeat: telemetry around a wireframe of the vehicle, a world map with the orbital ground track, and a terrain view where a deployment zone resolves to a landing point. The UI was drawn in sketches first, then built in After Effects and Cavalry over Cinema 4D renders of the vehicle.
Arc is Inversion's re-entry vehicle, and the film needed screens that could sit on a laptop in shot and still read as the real thing. The diagnostic view is the heart of it: a hexagonal frame with yaw, pitch and roll rotation dials, engine, gyro, thermal and solar logs, and a wireframe of the vehicle turning inside.
The map stack tracks the vehicle from orbit to ground. A world map with the orbital track and vehicle location, a terrain heat map with contour topology over the landing region, and a deployment view that marks zones available and unavailable in satellite imagery. Each exists as a loop, a still and a laptop-screen comp.
Colour went through rounds with Throttle Media: a blue build, a white build and an earlier high-colour pass, each delivered as full-frame UI and as screen-mapped versions for the laptop. The sketches at the end are where it started: pen layouts of the hex, the map and the telemetry blocks before anything was animated.
Screen graphics and interface design for a film about Inversion's Arc re-entry vehicle, with Throttle Media. Telemetry, orbital maps and deployment zones, built from sketch to screen.
