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 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."