Animation

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and an animation can be the perfect medium to convey a tricky concept!  I started making science animations in 2012 while working with PHD Comics, and since then I’ve worked with several NASA mission teams and academic researchers to explain complex topics in a fun and engaging way.

I primarily use Adobe Creative Suite (Audition, Illustrator, PhotoShop, After Effects, Premiere) to create and combine all of the pieces of my animations, and I have extensive experience in voice acting, audio and video editing, and motion graphics.

Here are a few of my recent projects:

I’m currently collaborating with the USC Institute for Creative Technologies on a series of animations, like this one featuring David Pynadath, director of social simulation research:

Also at USC, I’m working with the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology to explain recent paper abstracts, including this article on the connection between air pollution and Alzheimer’s disease:

Here’s another animated paper summary that I put together for Rice University’s School of Engineering:

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission launched in 2014 and has been measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide with unprecedented accuracy ever since.  Here’s a series of videos (there are currently four in this playlist) on the mission, the spacecraft, and the science of OCO-2:

My doctoral dissertation was all about lunar impact craters, so here’s a brief video I made explaining why we care so much about holes in the ground (and a very kind write-up by Phil Plait of Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog):

I’ve done some animation for the past couple of episodes of PHD TV’s series Ph.Detours, starring Dr. Alex Lockwood:

For her thesis defense, neuroscientist Dr. Crystal Dilworth wanted an animated introduction to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, so we collaborated to create one:

Along with with Dr. Laurence Yeung and Nic Perez, I entered the 2014 Ocean 180 Video Challenge, a contest aimed at bringing ocean science to middle schoolers in the form of video abstracts.  Our entry earned second prize!

How (and why) do we measure ocean winds from space? (in collaboration with RapidScat, a new scatterometer soon to be installed on the International Space Station):

Fellow scicomm enthusiasts Genevieve Jones and Rachael Porter and I put together this video about the brain, love, and homophones:

In 2013, I won the AGU Student Video Contest, run by the American Geophysical Union, for this animated explanation of postglacial rebound:

True Anomalies (Tales from the History of Science) started as a web series to explore the intersection of science communication, history of science, and animation.  You can read my blog and follow me on Twitter at @trueanomalies. I mostly write and tweet about history of science, planetary science, and science communication and outreach.  Here’s a playlist of the original web series episodes: