Remember the mysterious video that showed a penguin that escaped from the Biodôme? (Turned out to be an assignment from a class at Montreal’s Centre Nad. Well it looks like students from the same CGI class have made waves on YouTube. Their assignment has been viewed more than 2.3 million times.

It all started with an assignment from professor Robin Tremblay’s third-year class in the media effects concentration at the school for animation and design.

“The assignment was to create a believable prank or hoax using CGI elements over a camera shoot they had to do,” Tremblay explained to OpenFile Montreal. “Once the project completed, they had put the result online and promote it through their social networks. To create CGI effects that are totally oblivious to acute viewer is still a big challenge for most post-production companies, and is a even bigger hurdle for students.”

One group of students decided to incorporate the popularity of a video game with the science of controlled quantum levitation.

“When they submitted the idea, I was very excited of the viral potential,” Tremblay said. “The Wipeout video game is in the gaming community since the inception of Sony (Playstation) console and was always very popular. A recent scientific experiment involving superconductors, liquid nitrogen and levitation largely viewed on the Internet was the spark that gave the idea to my students.”