VIDEO: Tuesday - Dispatches from Margate

I'm currently in Margate on a week long artist residency (PRAH Foundation) producing work that is responsive to the local area. I'll be focusing on both video and audio outputs and as part of the project I've tasked myself with the grand challenge of producing (and publishing!) something each day...

Here's Tuesday's effort:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZxrEPbQgUA

On my first day, I spent a couple of hours walking around the waterfront with my camera and was particularly drawn to the dull tones of the Arlington House tower block. This drab, monolithic structure looms, rather oppressively, over the recently refurbished Dreamland fun park below (hoping to pay that a visit later in the week).

The colours from this scene influenced the overall grading of the piece, producing a rather muted colour profile throughout. I really liked the contrast of the blue sheds that emerge half way through, with the glimpse of the ferris wheel in the distance - neither of which can quite break free from the muted, sombre tones of their surroundings.

I shot this on my Sony A7s, which I haven't really had much chance to experiment this year. I also wanted to test out a couple M42 lenses that I'd recently picked up on ebay:

• Pentacon 135mm f/2.8
• Carl Zeiss MC Flektogon 35mm f/2.4

Video: Structure and Order - A Century of Symmetry

Chemical crystallographer Judith Howard reflects on the beautiful aesthetics of crystallographic exploration and her career, including time spent with Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmSMt-jU9iE

The end of the video provides links to some of the other videos in the crystallography collection!

Crystal Clear: Exploring Crystallography on Film

X-ray Crystallography - ever heard of it? Perhaps not, but it's arguably one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the 20th Century. Why? Well, it's an incredibly powerful technique that allows us to look at really small things, like protein molecules or even DNA! Once we know how these molecules are assembled, we can begin to better understand how they work. How does it work? Essentially you take your sample, crystallise it and then fire X-rays at it. You then measure the way in which the crystal scatters or diffracts the X-rays - the resulting 'diffraction pattern' is what you need (and a bit of maths) to work back to the structure of the molecules that make up the crystal. So in theory, as long as you can crystallise your sample - you should be able to work out the molecular structure!

To find out more watch this simple animation we recently published:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqQlwYv8VQI

The technique was developed over 100 years ago and it has led to some incredibly important discoveries, including the structure of DNA - since it's inception, work relating to Crystallography has been awarded 28 Nobel prizes. To mark the continuing success of Crystallography - we received funding from the STFC to produce a series of films that helped explain and celebrate this technique.

The above animation was scripted in house and animated by the awesome 12foot6 - it also features the voice of Stephen Curry, a structural biologist based at Imperial College London.

Understanding Crystallography

I produced and directed this two-part series, working with Elspeth Garman of Oxford University and Stephen Curry. The two pieces aim to explain how the technique works and what's needed to grow your crystals and subject them to X-ray analysis. The films take us from a microbiology lab at the University of Oxford to the Diamond Light Source, a huge facility that hosts a particle accelerator designed to generate incredibly powerful beams of X-rays.

As always, the hardest part in producing these pieces was in deconstructing the explanation of what is a very complicated process... hopefully we pulled it off - see for yourself below!

Part 1 - why proteins need to be crystallised and how this is done.

http://youtu.be/gLsC4wlrR2A

Part 2 - what it takes to shine x-rays at your crystals and how we work back from diffraction patterns to determine structures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJKvDUo3KRk

Crystallography and beyond

Producer Thom Hoffman also worked on this project - he produced two pieces, one exploring the history of farther and son team who helped develop the technique

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-ZnLtFgGwY

and the other looking at the application of this technique on the recent Curiosity Mars rover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr_PDXyNu1E

Video: This Film Sucks! - The Science of Leeches

Tim Cockerill returns to take a  look at some leeches in a short piece produced for YouTube's Geek Week back in August. If you're a bit squeamish this probably isn't for you! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jerqq06uxAo&w=640&h=360]

We couldn't really make a video about leeches without showing off their impressive feeding apparatus, a Y-shaped jaw packing in roughly 300 teeth! This was a tricky shot to achieve, we had to persuade the leech to attach to a glass plate, holding it in position by hand, allowing us to shoot from below with a macro lens. It was a great sight to behold once we finally got it and it certainly helps bring something to the film that you hopefully wont have seen elsewhere.

We also had to get some footage of a leech feeding, so we set one loose on Tim's arm, shooting a time-lapse to demonstrate how much they can expand during the feeding. Once it had attached to feed, we were very much at the mercy of the Leech's hunger as we couldn't shoot the final shots until it had detached. As Tim mentions in the film, it's not a good idea to pull or burn leeches off as this may cause them to vomit their stomach contents back into the open wound - not a good idea if you don't know what the leech as been feeding on previously. The best course of action to take is to let detach when it's good and ready.

We also wanted to dispel a common myth about leeches using anaesthetics to dull the pain the sensation of pain whilst feeding - as Tim reports there's little scientific evidence to support this and he certainly reports to feel a stinging sensation as the leech feeds on him.

After about 3 hours the leech was finally full and very happily detached from Tim's arm - during 'the feeding' the leech utilises an anti-coagulant (called hirudin) and as you can see in the film this prevents the blood from clotting, causing the wound to bleed profusely four a couple of hours after it's detached!

Christmas Lectures 2012 - Behind the Scenes

The Modern Alchemist

One of the great pleasures of working at the Royal Institution is witnessing the frenzy that goes on behind the scenes in the lead up to the Christmas Lectures. This year the lectures cover the chemical elements and are presented by Dr Peter Wothers, a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and teaching fellow at the University of Cambridge.

The lectures themselves are available for a limited period on iPlayer, but will also be available to stream indefinitely on the Ri Channel, the team behind them have done an incredible job and so they're well worth a watch - you don't necessarily need any scientific background or knowledge of Chemistry to enjoy them!

Naturally this year's subject lends itself well to the presentation of scientific demonstrations and there has been plenty of opportunity for loud bangs and fire spewing explosions. However, the lectures have also provided chance to perform some very rare and unusual demonstrations - and it's these that have formed the subject of a couple of behind the scenes films produced for the Ri Channel:

Reacting Caesium and Fluorine (First time on camera)

Fluorine and Caesium are the two most reactive elements in the periodic table and so for the lectures, Peter was very interested in trying to react them both together. However their extreme reactivity also means that they're both very dangerous to work wit, so it was important Peter found the right person to work with! Enter Dr Eric Hope a Fluorine specialist at the University of Leicester and so on a grey day in November we travelled up to see how this reaction might work and I think it might be the first time it has ever been caught on camera!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLOFaWdPxB0

What was particularly nice about this meeting was that Peter had never previously seen Fluorine and Eric had never seen Caesium! This demo features in the second lecture, 'Water: The Fountain of Youth'.

Cloud Chamber

I was so pleased I got to see this demo with my own eyes, I'd previously heard a lot about cloud chambers and seen a few bits of ropey footage on the internet, but never actually seen one in the flesh (so to speak). It's essentially a particle detector with a sealed environment that is supersaturated with alcohol vapour and as charged particles zip through the vapour they ionize it, allowing condensation trails to form.

It's an absolutely beautiful thing to look at, as it makes visible the background radiation that exists all around us and on the last day of recording I was lucky enough to capture this close-up on camera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OtiTeNWPH4

This demonstration features in the third lecture entitled 'The Philosopher's Stone'.

Testing Hydrogen Balloons

Lastly, the Christmas Lectures wouldn't be complete without some sort of gratuitous explosion and so here's a little film about testing different sized hydrogen balloons:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLuOM9aOWvk

Taking a Peek Inside the Living Lung

For the final Royal Institution Advent film, I travelled to the University of Sheffield MRI Unit at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, to look at how a very strange element is being used in a pioneering MRI technique to image living lungs. http://youtu.be/dmPmHSVqfZE

The film is presented by this year's Christmas Lecturer, Dr Peter Wothers (University of Cambridge) who takes part in the research programme by having his own lungs scanned. Conventional MRI is usually pretty poor at imaging areas such as the lungs, which have very little fatty tissue and water (MRI scanners essentially detect radio frequencies given off by protons in Hydrogen nuclei) - and so this novel technique involves the inhalation of hyper-polarised Xenon to image the ventilated lung. Xenon is an inert gas so is relatively safe to inhale, although it does have some unusual effects on the human body, especially on the voice - it's also a mild anaesthetic - so watch the film to see how it affects Peter!

Xenon Lungs

As the Xenon is only present within the respiratory system, signal is only detected within ventilated areas - areas in which Xenon is not present appear black on the resulting image. This therefore allows medical professionals to identify damaged or obstructed areas of the lung which may be poorly ventilated or not at all, providing a novel method of efficiently and non-invasively examining the lungs of a living patient.

The research is being conducted by Dr Jim Wild and his research assistant Helen Marshall (both featured in the film) at the University of Sheffield and is funded by the EPSRC. More information on this technique can be found here.

The films forms part of a series of 24, released daily in the Ri Advent Calendar here. The films are also available on YouTube and on the Ri Channel.