I was asked by Hay Festival as part of their new Trans.MISSION project to collaborate with a scientist and communicate their work.
The scientist i was paired with was Emily Shuckburgh  at the British Antarctic Survey.

Emily is a climate scientist and works on the polar oceans. I was invited to the BAS research facility in Cambridge to meet Emily and see their lab.
We visited their ice core freezer and I got to see ice that has been dated to 140,000 years ago.

 

I was given some directions by Emily about the stories they wanted to communicate about their work and once i got home I began writing an outline script.

 

 

 

Once the script was ok’ed I began some sketches…

The animation was created in Berlin by Perrine Marais and Sylwia Kubus. Matt Wand created the sound and music and Shane Solanki did the voice over…

       

And here is the final film!

 

As well as the animation I created this poster which I hope could be useful for schools and home to communicate climate change and the fascinating science behind to children.
the poster can be downloaded for free at up to A0 size for schools and anyone else that wants to print it HERE

 

This was a series of 3 collaborations. 

Daniel Binns (Aardman animation) and Ally Lewis created this fantastic animation

 

Nicola Davies and Ed Hawkins created these powerful poems combined with Ed’s visualisations here

Thanks to Andy Fryers and Jo Rodell-Jones for getting me involved with this fantastic project.
It is so important to try to bring this science to as wide an audience as possible and I am honoured to be asked to do this.