14th April 2021 - Comments Off on TED-Ed: Whatever happened to acid rain?
TED-Ed: Whatever happened to acid rain?
My latest film for TED-Ed explores the reasons you don't hear much about Acid Rain anymore. Studying past environmental problems when we have so many current ones may seem strange, but there is much to be learnt from the way some countries were able to reduce the threat of Acid Rain. In particular, it highlights the value in listening to scientists rather than lobbyists for business, and how the solutions to these problems can be lead by carefully considered policy changes.
The lead educationalist on the project was Joseph Goffman of the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program. TED-Ed provide me with his script and the voiceover from which I am free to develop the visual concept. The film was made in Adobe Animate, and bases its look on the 1960s and '70s milieu of the scientists who first noticed the increasing acidity of rain.
It comes almost a year since my last film for TED-Ed, which explored how steroids work. It is my 12th film for the YouTube channel, some of which have been viewed over 6 million times. Past films include an exploration of how clouds were named or how to detect a supernova. You can find out more here, or get in touch if you'd like me to make a film for you.
As always with The School of Life films, the script and voiceover were provided by Alain de Botton. I then ran with the design, choosing to make all the characters rabbits, apart from one scene in which a rabbit unmasks himself to reveal that he is in fact Søren Kierkegaard. This is the scene I enjoyed animating the most. As usual, it was made using Adobe Animate.
Anees Bahji is the educator behind the script supplied by TED-Ed, from which I designed and animated the film. As is often the case with films for TED-Ed, the challenge is to make often quite abstract ideas easy to grasp (what do steroids look like? How do you show the ways in which they interact with the human body?) Often I also face my own steep learning curve, when trying to depict activity at a molecular level.
Script and voiceover are provided by The School of Life, for whom I have made 
Here in the news section of my site you'll find articles on most of my previous works for the School of Life, as well as a dedicated page in my portfolio, on topics ranging from 
As with previous films for the School of Life, I am given both the script, and Alain de Botton's voiceover to work from. Design and animation is then up to me. The film follows three couples, one of whom is struggling with a threatening new found love of pickles.