Motionographer® TRANSIT | Metallux Studio

TRANSIT is a two-minute AI film created to mark the 265th anniversary of the 1761 transit of Venus.

The film tells the story of Edmond Halley’s prediction that Venus would cross the face of the Sun on June 6, 1761, an event he knew he would never live to witness. His proposal helped inspire a global scientific effort, sending observers across oceans and continents to measure a tiny shadow crossing the Sun.

At the height of the Seven Years’ War, rival nations made extraordinary accommodations to allow astronomers to continue their journeys. For a brief moment, science became more important than war. Their observations contributed to humanity’s efforts to calculate the distance to the Sun and understand the scale of the Solar System.

TRANSIT is also a reminder that collaboration is possible, even between enemies. At a time of war, climate crisis, and mounting attacks on science, it asks a simple question: what are we refusing to do together?

The film uses AI image and video generation tools to reconstruct eighteenth-century observatories, ships, and expeditions. The filmmakers draw a parallel between Halley’s global effort around a future event he would never see and the predictive AI models used to revisit that story more than two centuries later.

The narration evokes Winston Churchill, placing the voice of a twentieth-century statesman in conversation with an eighteenth-century achievement.