Texas Bullet Train
Imagining, then illustrating America’s first bullet train
for skeptical Texans
Roles: creative lead, feature ideation, concept & copywriting (video rendering), presentations, design research participant
Collaborators: Caleb Sawyer, John LaPrime
We were approached by UK’s Virgin Rail Group to assist Texas Central Partners in early ideation for the experience of America’s first bullet train, running 90 minutes from Houston to Dallas.
The job? Imagine the future state of the experience; a six years in the future. Help Texans who have never been on a train — and who think little of a four hour drive in their pickups — to think again.
Texas Central Partners wanted us to think practically but boldly, then develop a video for their road show.
The problem:
Texans transit in trucks, not trains.
Bullet trains? Foreign and weird.
Texans are not only used to 4+ hour drives between cities, they actually sort of like them. Hitting the wide open road in your fully decked F-250 super cab is nearly a Constitutional right.
Add in that most Texans have never been on any kind of passenger rail — not even a subway — and the idea of ditching their trucks for a super train like you’d see in Japan or Europe? They weren’t even in the area code of skeptical; the idea was just out beyond their conceptual outer limits.
Our challenge: give them a reason and vision to recalibrate to.
The process:
Our design team set out to discover how Texans currently commute, with ethnographic research. Then, we fused those findings into a set of experience principles; foundations for what consumers might come to expect of the start-to-finish journey — from booking through station wayfinding and into the train experience and destination arrival. I led client co-ideation to envision what could be, a full six years in the future.
The envisioning:
Working together with Caleb Sawyer and John LaPrime from my concept and script, we followed a woman able to hop a morning train, attend a noon meeting in Dallas, then return to pick her son up from school. A previously-impossible agenda for a single day was indeed achievable.
Caleb and John worked miracles to illustrate, then animate in CG the storyline, working from a voice track I produced. The merged film was one of the most impressive pieces of animation work I’ve ever been part of.
The final vision:
Texas Central Partners took this video online and on the road, using it as a demo of what the experience could look like. It gave Texans something to consider, without looking “too real” as to overpromise, and just remote enough for them to consider it unthreatening. Users were curious, and TCP credited this video with helping make a foreign concept more accessible.