What Is Science Communication?

In mid January, I was roped into volunteered to help with what promised to be an exciting and fun day: a Making for Science Communication workshop, run by my ‘Science In Motion’ partner in crime, Morag Hickman.

Morag gathered 16 students and four techie assistants (myself included) into the Humanities department at Imperial College. For 12 hours on a Saturday, we brainstormed, planned, argued, made, photographed, filmed, recorded and edited. I was expecting something along the lines of a craft workshop; what the day actually provided was an insight into the whole process of storytelling and creation of a video, from a concept to completion.

The brief was wide open at the start of the day. The students had been asked to bring in audio clips of people talking around the question, ‘What is Science Communication?’. There were responses from scientists, children and science communicators, with lots of viewpoints represented. Having listened to the contributions, we had our task: put it together in some semblance of order, and then create visuals to go with it. Here’s the result:

It’s a gentle, thoughtful piece, peppered with Haiku poems written by children about science. What was more interesting was the process we went through. I learned just as much as the students, I think!

The quantity and diversity of the audio clips was always going to pose a challenge – probably about half an hour of it all up, and we needed to slice and dice it down into a digestible but still insightful mix. Morag led the group through the early stages of scripting, then let them argue things out. I must say this was the most difficult part of the workshop; Morag’s expertise lies in the creative making side of things, and scripting with a group of 16 is an almost unachievable task. Fortunately, Morag had assembled a team to help with such situations, and introduced Alia in the role of Exective Producer to whip the script quickly into shape. The result perhaps wasn’t ‘ideal’ given the material we had, but it pushed us through to the next phase: making.

Four groups split off, each storyboarding then animating a scene. They had half an hour to do each scene, start to finish; so each little clip in the video above was conceptualised and created, with no rough-cuts or test shooting, in a ridiculously short time. Some worked better than others, but all were an opportunity to experiment with different techniques and think outside of the box when adding visuals to audio.

Morag led this process very effectively: keeping an eye on the time, offering help and advice throughout and providing some great tips and tricks. I spent most of the time compiling stop-motions and helping with camera work; there may be a making-of video soon, which will document more of the process.

I drew a couple of things from the day, even from my slightly-outside-position. One was to see the condensed creative process, and where sticking points lie in such time-limited projects. The value of being able to mull over problems and ideas is huge. Another was to see just how much can be achieved in a short time using relatively simple techniques.

Clearly, the video is far from polished, but it was created in one day by a group with, functionally, zero experience! It was exhausting – 14 hours, in the end – but I’m confident that reflecting on the process, difficulties and success of the day will give the students a platform to build their skills from, which would take much longer to build through self-exploration alone.

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!

A trio and a mission

I hope you like them!

Two snowfalls in a week – nice.

I’m about to embark upon a month of work that will step me out of the slightly-carved groove I’ve been in of late. For the next two weeks, the Science Museum will be buzzing with half-term visitors. The week after, we’re putting on what could be our most important ever Lates event, and then moving galleries. I really believe in the work that I’m doing, but until recently I’ve been focusing on making sure the lab is functioning well within the Museum; now, I need to show anyone and everyone that what we have is a model of a shattered ivory tower, where anyone can participate in science in a meaningful way.

On Wednesday, two visitors blew me away when they energetically bounced around the gallery playing with the more superficial ‘toys’ we’ve got that mess with the senses. They were mid-20′s, and to talk to them, it was clear that science wasn’t really their ‘thing’ but they were interested enough. Helen, one of the researchers running an experiment in the gallery, convinced them to sit down for an intense, half-hour memory and reaction time test. At first they were approaching it as a game, racing through the sections, but by the end they were absorbed in the repetitive motions and trying to second-guess the information they were giving.

Then, for 15 minutes – and well after the gallery was closed to other visitors – they picked Helen’s brain about the research, asking fundamental questions of what she was trying to find out, why, what outcomes it might get, and what the test would say about them personally. It was a beautiful moment, because it was clearly the first time they had ever been able to have an in-depth conversation with a scientist, and the physical energy they had at the start had transformed into a genuine thirst for understanding.

For that kind of experience to be available, free, to anyone who cares to visit, is good – for the visitors, and for the scientist. They will remember the experience, and I had a quick chat to Helen afterward, and she said that it didn’t happen often, but having people really take an interest in her work was special.

It’s the kind of thing we talked about in the Masters of Science Communication course, and in many ways it’s the purest form of public engagement with science possible. Very few scientists and groups have had the chance, or would take the risk, to operate how we do; I hope we can get the funding to continue making it possible.

Anyway. I will probably be writing more about our work soon, so watch this space for link love!

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.

In case you missed out

This video’s been going viral. It’s about rotating your owl. For science.

I heartily endorse it.