Making a TEDEd Lesson Animation
Transcriber: Andrea McDonough
Reviewer: Jessica Ruby
Enough mutations can bypass these fail-safes,
driving these cells to divide recklessly.
That one rogue cell becomes two,
then four,
then eight.
“How do you animate real materials,
like brains and nerves and stuff like that?
How do you take something that doesn’t move
and then make it move?”
“So, that’s actually, we used a method
called stop-motion animation,
in which you are moving the objects
underneath the camera,
each frame, one at a time,
and you take a picture
for each picture that you’ve created.
So, for this, we were watching a lot of videos
on how cell division works,
and from that, I created a line-drawn animation
that was my reference animation.
And, using the software that we use for stop-motion,
I was actually able to look
at that reference material while shooting
so I could kind of arrange underneath the camera
in order to match my animation
as I would follow along.
And we actually shot all of this on a green screen,
and the purpose of using the green screen was,
for example, in the scene where you see
many cells dividing at one time,
for me to have actually have to animate each of those cells
unanimously dividing at the same time
would have been a lot of work
that we wouldn’t have had time for.
So, the green screen allowed me to do
a couple of cell divisions
that I could then duplicate
in order to show cell division:
two, then four, then eight.”
“So, you only have to basically actually record it once
and then you can just duplicate it on the computer.”
“Exactly.”
“So, it sounds really painstaking.
How long did it take to, like, record one cell division?”
“I think I did in a day, I did a couple of cell divisions.
So, sort of a full work day,
so, probably a couple of hours for one.
I think, actually, the stuff that took longer was the text.
We were animating the word, ‘growth’.
We were animating it getting smaller and taller and wider.
And for this, I was literally adding one single seed at a time
in order to create that animation.”
“So, how did you animate the word cancer?”
“I actually started with the word cancer written
and moved backwards
and was surgically removing one seed at a time,
and then we played that photage backwards
to make it look like it was appearing.
We use that trick a lot of times in stop-motion
because if you want things to really conform,
any time that you’re having things come together
or fall apart,
it usually makes more sense
to start with that together frame
and work from there,
and do the scatter from there,
and then, just play that in reverse.
It’s a little too painstaking.
Stop-motion is painstaking,
it’s a labor of love,
but you have to also be practical
when you have a deadline.”
“So, there’s this technique that you guys use
to make the cells look like they’re alive
so they’re not just sitting there.
That’s called shimmering.
How does that work exactly?”
“So, in animation, shimmering is usually when you are,
if you’re doing drawn animation,
you’re drawing that same drawing multiple times
but with slight variations
so that way, you don’t have a stagnant, still frame
under the camera.
With the cells, using the seeds and the Nerds,
we had the opportunity to really have a look,
like they were kind of vibrating and pulsating in a way.
And so, those are actually, depending on the cell,
three to five pictures.
With the candy Nerds,
I would rearrange their position each time
so there’s actually removing all the colorful Nerds,
leaving the purple ones in the center
and moving the colorful ones back in
into a different position.
But with the seeds,
when the seeds were shimmering,
for that, I would actually
just very, very, very lightly, like,
roll my hand over it very slightly
and then make sure none of them
fell out of the constraints of the cell,
fix the edges,
and take that picture,
and just slightly do that again.
So, it just slightly changes their position
or rustles them up a little bit
so that would cycle over and over.
And those would play on what animators call threes.
And threes means that each picture
is on screen for three frames
at twenty-four frames per second.
So, for the shimmers, you were seeing
eight different pictures each second of footage.”
“How much of your sweat and tears
are on these Nerds?”
“I think, actually, to be honest,
the part that was the most perspirational
of using the Nerds for animation
was the place where we had to separate them into colors
in order to use them to animate.
Every time I would put them on the screen to animate,
on the tabletop to animate,
I would have to separate them out
at the end of the day again.
And that was the most frustrating part.
And, honestly, up until, like, three weeks ago,
I dropped my purse on the ground
and, like, lentils came out of my purse and onto the floor.
Like, there’s, this video will stay with me forever.”
“In your bag.”
“In my bag.
It goes wherever I go.”