https://vimeo.com/136084530 Over the summer I worked with the talented artist and illustrator Andrew Khosravani on what will be the first of a series of animated shorts for the Royal Institution's digital video channels.
For sometime I'd wanted to re-purpose content from our long-form lecture videos by excerpting audio clips and using these as the basis for animations. Other organisations have had great success doing this in the past, particularly the RSA (check out their RSA animate videos) and so it struck me as a no-brainer when Andrew recently joined our team.
In choosing the right clip, it was important to find an excerpt that was fairly self-contained and that would stand-alone outside of the context of the longer event video. For this first project we decided upon an excerpt from a Q&A event with the Pulitzer prize winning scientist and author Jared Diamond, filmed back in 2013. In the excerpt, Jared discusses how insights from the lifestyles of far-removed cultures can impact the way we think about our own lives, particularly in the context of our approach to risk - an anecdote that has always stuck with me since filming the event.
After trimming and pruning the audio clip to get the flow as tight as possible Andrew set about story boarding the piece and after we were agreed on the direction he set about creating the artwork assets and animation. As you'll see from watching the piece, the attention to detail is pretty breathtaking, Andrew writes on the Ri Blog,
"Because of the density of the vegetation in the animation, some of these scenes were created with upwards of 1000 layers of illustration."
All this serves to creates an incredible visual feast, one that really pulls the audio into a rich and colourful visual medium.
Once the animation was finished I worked on the sound design to tidy up the audio clip and add a little more depth and weight to the piece. As you'll hear it's all fairly subtle, which was necessary because the visuals are definitely leading here and there's a lot going on in the frame already.
The aim of this project was always to blend scientific content with an artistic aesthetic in an attempted to reach audiences that don't traditionally engage with our more science heavy content. The piece was subsequently awarded a 'staff pick' on Vimeo and was picked up by several art and design sites around the web, so we were obviously pretty chuffed about that!
We're now working on our second piece, which sets visuals to an audio piece I made, featuring British astronaut Helen Sharman discussing her dreams about space. We will be releasing this piece in the lead up to the Christmas Lectures - so stay tuned!