Viral

A video I helped to make 8 months ago went viral yesterday. Fun fun.

For me, it’s a nice little ego boost to see people enjoying our work. The video, which is a reconstruction of Seven Nation Army using sounds and footage from scientific lab equipment, looks like this:

It went viral from Boing Boing, and even managed to make it to the CBS News blog!

It was on the Inside Knowledge project, where 4 of us embedded for 3 months with the Blast lab at Imperial. Lizzie was the architect, Anna the journalist, Ben the creative genius and me the camera geek (there was substantial blurring of these oversimplified boundaries, of course, because we’re all great at everything!).

I arrived at the Blast lab on a Monday afternoon, with a list in my pocket of the different sounds in Seven Nation Army and some scribbled notes on which aspects of their lab could fit sonically and visually. Having explained the concept to the guys running the experiment, I proceeded to stalk around for 3 hours, collecting most of the footage observationally. A few times, though, the guys took pity on me and blatantly helped out by banging, for example, a tyre with a hammer.

Then came the arduous process of the edit. Ben sat down with 40-odd movie files and started slugging away, chopping, changing, flipping and dicing. I ripped the sound files out of the movies, recorded a ukelele twang for the strings, and started cutting them all together. All of the percussive sounds are real (with some post processing), and the string-based stuff is effectively synthesised, though from a real acoustic string being plucked.

There’s flaws – we edited it in an afternoon, side by side, and only synched it up at the end – so parts work well and others are a bit off. But I think it works nicely to demonstrate our concept, and it shows how sense can emerge from a series of individually meaningless actions. And it’s also great to see that many of the sites who reposted the video actually went back, found out the context (about the Blast Lab and our project) and added their own thoughts and insight, rather than just saying ‘lol cool’.

Anyway – 60,000 hits and counting – I am going to be interested to see the analytics provided by Youtube about the process, and speed, of the viral rush. The dynamics of the internet fascinate me!

Here's an unrelated shot of an extremely busy Half-Term lottolab this week!

“I want to be a Doom Robot!”

OK, so I didn’t really want to be a Doom Robot when I was a kid. But the question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, is asked of children so frequently, and we all think of the same stereotypes: firefighter, astronaut, and so on. But scientist? Who wants to be a crazy old man with sticky-up hair and a lab coat?

Dr Adam Hill, of Imperial's Blast research group, just wasn't sure... click to read on!

Click on the picture to read the post and see our time-travel photo magic (err, magic? Maybe not…). Also: what did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be David Attenborough. I know it’s not a profession, but I thought it was at the time.

Tooth Fairy Palaces and Ivory Towers

OK, so I didn’t get my choice of title on the article. But here’s a taste:

Sara and Gina are collecting baby teeth, to build a palace.

Gina: “The experiment has gone so far, without even being made, that it’s become an interesting journey. What we saw as the end was actually the start.”

Sara: “And the end doesn’t matter so much.”

Gina: “There is no end. But I don’t want to be sticking teeth to a sculpture for the next ten years.”

Anna Perman and I wrote a final major article for the Inside Knowledge blog collaboration with the Imperial College Blast research group. It’s about science outreach: why do scientists do it, what is it for and can it be a bad thing? They’re big questions to tackle, and we can’t offer anything more than informed thoughts. If you’re into science, either on the doing, communicating or hearing about side of things, I’d love it if you could read the article and leave your thoughts either here or over on PLoS.

My new job, starting mid September, will be helping to co-ordinate science outreach with Lottolab Studio. And it means I get to play with giant colourful dice.

Science Nation Army

Shooting and editing this – especially constructing the audio from scratch, while the tireless Ben did the visuals – went from fun, to tedious, to painful. It was worth it though. If you click on ‘youtube’ in the bottom corner of the embedded player, you can see the list of the ‘instruments’ in terms of their real lab uses!

This video was constructed from scratch, using real sounds and footage from the lab. Some adjustment of the raw sound was necessary, and string sounds had to be recreated using stringed instruments. As with any complex project, pulling together the disparate pieces was a real challenge!

Read the rest of the background to the video at Inside Knowledge.

Photo Week #1: The Wire

Ready to be blasted.

This week, I’ll be putting up a photo per day from recent shooting sessions. This one’s from an Inside Knowledge shoot, which will be going live this week.