Making a TED-Ed Lesson: Creative process

Transcriber: Andrea McDonough
Reviewer: Jessica Ruby

The healthy liver cell divides only when it's stressed. The healthy hair cell divides frequently. And the cancer cell divides even more frequently and recklessly.

"The first draft that I saw was, like, four days before it was supposed to go online or something like that, and I hadn't heard, you know I hadn't heard, so, I was like, 'Hey, guys, just wondering if you need me for anything?' You know? And so she floods my inbox with emails, being like, 'Yes, we actually need you for a bunch of stuff!' And it was great. Like, when I first saw it, I mean, you immediately get the whole natural versus unnatural technique."

"Not good for you?"

"Right, yes, there you go, good for you and not good for you. Seeing that, actually, was really cool because, I mean, I had no idea. Writing the script, you have no idea what it's going to turn out like in the end. But you get this, like, intuitive feel of 'Okay, like, yeah, I get why this is a cancer cell, and I get why this is a healthy cell.' And, actually, I showed it to, I showed an early draft to the professor with whom I was fact-checking the script, who is a cancer researcher at MIT, and he said that it was one of the best visualizations of cancer cells that he'd ever seen. So, that was really cool to hear as well."

"When you get a script, do you make a storyboard or not?"

"I guess it depends on the method that we use to produce the piece because, for example, things that would definitely be character-heavy, like 'Ladder of Inference', we worked with a storyboard from beginning to end because we were dealing with character animation. And something like that is much different than stop-motion, for example. But, also, I mean Biljana and I have also worked together for, like, nearly ten years or something absurd, so we don't need as much of a, you know, a piece of paper to tell us what to do, whereas, if I were working with someone new, then I would really want to work with a storyboard, but we kind of trust each other."

"So, you, like, finish..."

"...each other's sentences."

"We can try that again."

"No, we definitely shouldn't use that, it's too cheesy."

"So, there was a part in the video where we had to represent how the cells reproduce and how chemotherapy affects it. And it became quite complicated for me to visualize, so I actually had to ask you to draw little doodles for me to actually explain that. How was that for you? How was that experience?"

"I mean, it was pretty difficult for me to visualize, too, so, it was interesting. Doing the storyboard actually helped me clarify in my head, like, how it actually works because when you have to explain something to someone else, with anything, obviously, you have to, like, really figure it out yourself. And, then, when you have to draw it, that requires you to take an extra level of abstraction and figure out, like, okay, like, what are the parts of this drawing that are really important? What do I have to show clearly, and how do I show it? And, so, doing that on a legal pad, which is, I think, how I ended up sending it to you guys, taking a picture of myself on camera, really helped, you know, me understand the crucial, and that's the crucial part of why chemotherapy actually works. So, it was a really interesting experience."

"Yeah, we actually started that on a, we had a whiteboard, and I was trying to figure out that process. I think we started at the beginning from cell division and multiplying and, you know, chemotherapy working. But then it became so crazy that I had to pull back and start from the end and go in a different direction. So, that became quite a challenge, too, figuring it out."

"We ended up using the visual that you gave us on the storyboard, which is really cool to have that sort of collaboration with the educator with whom you're working."

"And I can't draw, so that should be noted. It was a very rough storyboard."

"It was good enough."

"Good enough!"