Making a TED-Ed 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 footage 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."