Tag Archives: climate change

Use Animation to Tell a Story about Science

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Telling stories about science can be fun and rewarding, but not always easy to accomplish with video. Animation software can help us tell our stories in a way that is appealing both visually and emotionally. Animation can be an especially good option when live action is difficult or impossible to film. You can let your imagination go wild in an animated film. The laws of physics can be suspended. Time can be compressed or expanded. The action can take place on Earth, on a distant planet in the Andromeda galaxy, or in an imaginary world populated by talking tomatoes. The hero can be a human or, just as easily, an animal or a machine. Characters in a story can have ordinary traits or be imbued with magical powers. The possibilities are endless.

Animation can come in handy telling stories about science or scientists. With an animation, a science filmmaker has much greater freedom to present a concept or to share a particular viewpoint. For example, you might want to show how an atoll develops over millennia from an underwater volcano (see video below), but there are some aspects that cannot be filmed easily. Using an animation to illustrate the different stages in atoll development, for example, lets the filmmaker depict geological processes that are too slow to film—and simultaneously makes the entire process easier to visualize. Basic animations like the ones in Birth of an Atoll can be created in PowerPoint.

Don’t want to have a human narrator or protagonist in your science video? With an animated film, a filmmaker can build a story around a non-human character with very human thoughts and feelings—one that appeals to a broad audience. A great example is the Disney-Pixar animated film, WALL-E (see movie trailer below), which features a lonely cleaning robot on a garbage-filled and lifeless Earth who falls in love with EVE, a more advanced robot sent to scan the planet for signs of life. The film quickly draws you in and makes you root for the little robot. Many things happen in the film that are far-fetched, but are readily accepted by the viewer. And the film gets across a message about what might happen to the Earth (and to the human race) if we aren’t careful. Telling the story from the viewpoint of a sentient machine helps the audience see, through other eyes, where rampant consumerism, corporatism, and human reliance on technology might lead. This approach works because the viewer becomes emotionally invested in the story and its characters and is thus more receptive to the underlying message.

Of course, the production of WALL-E required a vast team of scriptwriters, designers, animators, sound specialists, and more. However, you don’t need an army of professional animators to create a short film to illustrate a scientific concept or to tell a story. As I mentioned above, simple animations can be produced in PowerPoint. And for more sophisticated animation, there are a number of animation software packages that are available for both professionals and non-professionals. However, the learning curve for these applications is usually steep. And to create comic-type animations, you need some serious drawing and design skills.

What’s needed is something a bit more user-friendly. A few years ago, I discovered  MotionArtist, a Comic Animation software by SmithMicro and tried the beta version of the software to create a graphic story (Brown Marsh Apocalypse). It’s been upgraded since then, with several improvements and bug fixes. This software basically lets the user create story panels (like the ones in a cartoon), import media and then add motion to individual on-screen objects as well as to sequence everything in a timeline to tell a story. MotionArtist was designed primarily for comic artists to import their illustrations and then to animate the artwork, converting it to digital format for posting online. However, use is not limited to this narrow purpose. The import function also lets the user bring in images, video clips, and audio tracks—and these can be sequenced to tell a story—in much the same way movie editing software works to sequence video clips. Layered Photoshop files can also be imported—as a composite or as individual layers, which can then be individually animated. The screenshot below shows the MotionArtist workspace in “Director view” (click on the image to see full view).

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In the timeline (at the bottom of screen), the user creates scenes to build a storyline. Each scene contains one or more panels. A “camera view” lets the user pan across panels or zoom in or out of a panel. The scene pictured above contains three panels, the size and shape of which can be customized with shape-drawing tools. The top-left panel contains an imported video clip. The top-right panel contains a photo and a word balloon. Word balloons are easily created and animated, allowing the user to produce conversations by the characters in the story. The bottom panel contains a background photo and several individual objects (images of plant stems and snails) that were imported separately and that can be separately animated. For example, I can have a sequence in which the snails are moving up or down the plant stems. Each imported object or panel is represented in a track, stacked in the timeline. Stop points (like keyframes) are used to set the timing for each track. I wanted to add some background sound and so imported an audio file of waves lapping on the shore (this audio track is the top-most track in the timeline). The user can play the working files back in real time, which helps in editing. Once the animation is completed, the user can preview the HTML5 file online in a browser window or export as an interactive HTML5 file or as a video file.

To relearn how to use the software and examine the various features that might work with my media, I used MotionArtist to 1) illustrate a biological process and 2) tell a graphic story. I first tried to animate a leaf falling from a tree canopy to the forest floor where it fragments and decays (see video below). I used only four photographs to create this animation. You can see this brief animation below. In a future tutorial, I will show how I used MotionArtist to animate the leaves.

I also wanted to create a longer animation that told a story….one that would require me to use more of the tools and features of MotionArtist. I decided to do a sequel to the Brown Marsh Apocalypse and tell a new story about how climate change may affect coastal ecosystems in the Mississippi River Delta. Warmer temperatures during the past few decades have allowed the spread of tropical trees (called mangroves), which are replacing salt marsh grasses. How will such changes affect the coast? The tale of this environmental change is again told from the viewpoint of a marsh snail who was the hero of the previous video. This story follows Perry on a quest to find out how climate change may change the snails’ home and way of life. As you’ll see in the video below, I was able to tell the story with mostly photographs and text balloons.

In conclusion, I had a lot of fun playing around again with the MotionArtist application. I found this latest version of MotionArtist relatively easy to use, although some tasks took a bit of trial and error to figure out. As the examples I’ve shared here illustrate, animation software can be used effectively to demonstrate a scientific process or to tell a story about science…and it need not require artistic skills that the scientist videographer lacks. All it takes is imagination and the ability to visualize the story you wish to tell or the process you wish to convey.

How Not To Make A Science Video

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As we know, explaining complicated science concepts and implications of research findings in a way that is understandable, interesting, and entertaining to diverse audiences is not easy. One of the important science issues of the day, which decision-makers and the general public need to understand, is climate change. Several organizations, such as RealClimate, have attempted to communicate climate science via their websites, blogs, and other media.

This past spring (2012), the World Resources Institute (WRI), supported by google.org, ran a survey to find out which type of video format (“webcam”, “conversation”, and “whiteboard”) worked best for scientists to get across some complex information about climate change. Three scientists, Paul Higgins (American Meteorological Society), Brian Helmuth (University of South Carolina), and Andy Dessler (Texas A&M), were recruited for the project. For the “webcam” version, all three scientists filmed their own videos. The “conversation” version was composed of a slideshow with the scientists’ voiceover. The “whiteboard” videos were filmed at the WRI’s offices, where each scientist conducted their talk using a whiteboard to illustrate their points.

You can see all the videos here, but I’ve inserted three below (by Paul Higgins) so you can see how well (or not) they worked. Then, about 1500 people voted on which ones that most effectively communicated the science topic.

As you can see, none is very effective at communicating the science of climate change. And that’s not just my opinion. If you read the review comments, you see that a number of viewers thought the videos failed to engage. One commenter suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that the bad videos were a ploy to get donations to make more professional videos about climate change (give us money or we’ll use these videos to communicate climate science to the public!). I actually had similar thoughts upon viewing these awkward and very dull presentations.

Also like the above commenter, I am not trying to disparage the scientists who participated in this project. They were given poor options of bad, bad, and worse, so no wonder they did not do well. Few of us could do better, given these three choices. The videos done by Dr. Helmuth were marginally better because he seems to be a bit less “stuck in his head” than Dr. Higgins; also, his topic (climate change effects on sea stars) is a bit more accessible to the average person than the carbon cycle. If you are a scientist and your topic deals with more abstract concepts, then you will have to work harder than someone who studies charismatic organisms or ecosystems, e.g., the Giant Panda or coral reefs.

Much better videos about climate change have been produced by Peter Sinclair (Climate Crock of the Week), which are usually well-done, include data from peer-reviewed publications as well as interviews with real scientists explaining their work and clips from the media and movies that add some humor and entertainment to the topic. Even the ones he’s done that are mostly composed of interviews with scientists are more engaging than the WRI videos. The most recent such video shot at the 2012 American Geophysical Union conference, even features one of the WRI scientists, Dr. Andrew Dressler, who comes across much better in this off-the-cuff interview than in the WRI videos.

Note how Sinclair inter-cuts footage, images, and graphics to supplement and support what the interviewees are saying. Not as well done as some of his other videos but the video has a spontaneous, unrehearsed feel to it, and most of the scientists sound sincere and natural in their comments.

I was additionally annoyed by the fact that the scientists selected for the WRI exercise were all older white males. I mean, really, couldn’t they find one female or minority to record a set of videos? If you are trying to reach a diverse audience, you need to show scientists to whom viewers can relate. A perfect example is the video of Katharine Hayhoe (a real climate scientist) answering 10 questions about her work and her religious beliefs:

Now, Dr. Hayhoe’s video was not designed to explain climate science or research findings and is not directly comparable to the WRI videos in that aspect. My point in showing it, however, is to emphasize how important it is for the scientist to be engaging and believable (as opposed to being preachy or appearing to have an agenda)….if you are going to do a “talking heads” type of video. Also, having a scientist with whom your target audience can relate (young or religious people, for example) is key to effectively communicating your message.

The intended audience of Dr. Hayhoe’s video was clearly people with strong religious beliefs and who’ve been targeted by the climate science misinformation campaign. The WRI videos are less clear about their target audience and appear to suffer from the common problem of the scientist failing to understand their audience (or expecting the audience to educate themselves so that they can understand the video topic). Most scientists think that facts, facts, and more facts are what is convincing to non-scientists, when the reverse is more often the case. Note how the video with Dr. Hayhoe focused on her beliefs, emotions, and humor….all effective in reaching the viewer at more than just an intellectual level. The scientists in the WRI videos appear to be robotic by comparison. Only after the viewer has come to “know” and “like” Dr. Hayhoe does the video ask and have her answer the key question: Is climate change real and are humans causing it?

If you must have a senior scientist explaining the main points, then have segments showing younger scientists or students working in the lab or field or, better yet, explaining their interest in the topic and why they’ve chosen to work on it. This approach will at least have some person with whom the younger or non-scientist viewer can relate. Unless you’re a TED-worthy speaker, capable of entrancing an audience by talking about incredible ideas or innovations, then you can’t do a video with just you talking.

The WRI videos followed few of the guidelines we’ve been discussing on this site, whereas the one with Katharine Hayhoe did, especially in terms of reaching an audience at an emotional level. In future posts, I’ll do a more in-depth assessment of these videos and why they did or did not work well.

Finally, it seemed that the idea for the WRI videos was to survey formats that scientists, with their apparent lack of videography skills, might use. Well, if these are the only options, scientists just shouldn’t bother and leave the filmmaking to professionals. However, as I’ve tried to demonstrate with this blog, most scientists can learn enough basics about filming and editing to create very effective videos.