TED Talks Live were held at The Town Hall Theater in NYC, in November of 2015. I had the pleasure of attending all six nights to hear speakers present impactful Ideas Worth Spreading. This post is an analysis of a talk by Danielle Feinberg on the magic ability of Pixar movies to capture our imagination.
Watch Danielle’s TED Talk. She not only speaks to her personal passion, but how her experiences at Pixar create films that touch the lives of millions. By tying the innocence of animation to the physics of lighting she provides a unique behind-the-scenes view of how art is blended with science, and how the dream that we imagine can become our reality.
Transcript
(my notes in red)
When I was seven years old, some well-meaning adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Proudly, I said: “An artist.” “No, you don’t,” he said, “You can’t make a living being an artist!”
For some people the life they lead as an adult began with a dream in childhood. I’ve found this to be true for a lot of artists, writers, musicians, even teachers and attorneys. It’s an opening that connects to an audience (we’ve all had dreams as children) and sets the stage for the narrative that follows.
My little seven-year-old Picasso dreams were crushed. But I gathered myself, went off in search of a new dream, eventually settling on being a scientist, perhaps something like the next Albert Einstein.
I have always loved math and science, later, coding. And so I decided to study computer programming in college. In my junior year, my computer graphics professor showed us these wonderful short films. It was the first computer animation any of us had ever seen. I watched these films in wonder, transfixed, fireworks going off in my head, thinking, “That is what I want to do with my life.” The idea that all the math, science and code I had been learning could come together to create these worlds and characters and stories I connected with, was pure magic for me.
Detours are another factor in many lives. What seems to be a change in direction ends up circling back, though often in a modified way. Danielle comes back to art, but from the perspective of computer graphics. Think about the detours in your personal story that an audience would appreciate hearing about.
Just two years later, I started working at the place that made those films, Pixar Animation Studios. It was here I learned how we actually execute those films. To create our movies, we create a three-dimensional world inside the computer. We start with a point that makes a line that makes a face that creates characters, or trees and rocks that eventually become a forest. And because it’s a three-dimensional world, we can move a camera around inside that world. I was fascinated by all of it. But then I got my first taste of lighting.
While Danielle’s personal experiences continue to be foundational to this story, there’s a shift at this point away from her and toward to topic of her talk – what brings Pixar movies to light. Using the visual on the screen behind her, the audience is pulled into the world of animation. The combination of image and words can transport people into your experience…
Lighting in practice is placing lights inside this three-dimensional world. I actually have icons of lights I move around in there. Here you can see I’ve added a light, I’m turning on the rough version of lighting in our software, turn on shadows and placing the light. As I place a light, I think about what it might look like in real life, but balance that out with what we need artistically and for the story. So it might look like this at first, but as we adjust this and move that in weeks of work, in rough form it might look like this, and in final form, like this.
…and in this story, there’s no substitute for the visual imagery. It is possible to describe how lighting works in the animation process without the accompanying visuals – and I always invite storytellers to think about how they would tell their story using only words – but in Danielle’s story the impact would only be a fraction of what she is able to achieve.
There’s this moment in lighting that made me fall utterly in love with it. It’s where we go from this to this. It’s the moment where all the pieces come together, and suddenly the world comes to life as if it’s an actual place that exists. This moment never gets old, especially for that little seven-year-old girl that wanted to be an artist.
As I learned to light, I learned about using light to help tell story, to set the time of day, to create the mood, to guide the audience’s eye, how to make a character look appealing or stand out in a busy set.
While the specific topic is lighting in animation, the revelation described applies across the creative spectrum. The ability of elements such as sound, color, texture, and perspective can tell a story of it’s own. Storytelling in general can tap into this attribute through description. Can you describe a scene in such a way as to enhance your story?
Did you see WALL-E? There he is. As you can see, we can create any world that we want inside the computer. We can make a world with monsters, with robots that fall in love, we can even make pigs fly.
While this is an incredible thing, this untethered artistic freedom, it can create chaos. It can create unbelievable worlds, unbelievable movement, things that are jarring to the audience.
So to combat this, we tether ourselves with science. We use science and the world we know as a backbone, to ground ourselves in something relatable and recognizable. “Finding Nemo” is an excellent example of this. A major portion of the movie takes place underwater. But how do you make it look underwater?
In early research and development, we took a clip of underwater footage and recreated it in the computer. Then we broke it back down to see which elements make up that underwater look. One of the most critical elements was how the light travels through the water. So we coded up a light that mimics this physics — first, the visibility of the water, and then what happens with the color. Objects close to the eye have their full, rich colors. As light travels deeper into the water, we lose the red wavelengths, then the green wavelengths, leaving us with blue at the far depths.
Danielle uses a science story block to explain how the folks at Pixar tapped into how light works to create realistic images that our eye accepts as real. Similarly, science can be used to expand up a number of other topics, from human emotions to the effects of climate change. Many times the science alone can come off as too technical, and thus, too boring, but when tied to a real life application / situation, the science comes to life.
In this clip you can see two other important elements. The first is the surge and swell, or the invisible underwater current that pushes the bits of particulate around in the water. The second is the caustics. These are the ribbons of light, like you might see on the bottom of a pool, that are created when the sun bends through the crests of the ripples and waves on the ocean’s surface. Here we have the fog beams. These give us color depth cues, but also tells which direction is up in shots where we don’t see the water surface. The other really cool thing you can see here is that we lit that particulate only with the caustics, so that as it goes in and out of those ribbons of light, it appears and disappears, lending a subtle, magical sparkle to the underwater.
You can see how we’re using the science — the physics of water, light and movement — to tether that artistic freedom. But we are not beholden to it. We considered each of these elements and which ones had to be scientifically accurate and which ones we could push and pull to suit the story and the mood.
We realized early on that color was one we had some leeway with. So here’s a traditionally colored underwater scene. But here, we can take Sydney Harbor and push it fairly green to suit the sad mood of what’s happening. In this scene, it’s really important we see deep into the underwater, so we understand what the East Australian Current is, that the turtles are diving into and going on this roller coaster ride. So we pushed the visibility of the water well past anything you would ever see in real life. Because in the end, we are not trying to recreate the scientifically correct real world, we’re trying to create a believable world, one the audience can immerse themselves in to experience the story.
It’s important to draw a distinction between the creation of a fictional story (one told in an animated movie) and the telling of a true story. While Danielle and the folks at Pixar have the ability to violate the laws of physics for artistic impact, storytelling with impact requires that only the truth be told. It will be your version of the truth, and other people may see things differently, but your story is authentic to the real world.
We use science to create something wonderful. We use story and artistic touch to get us to a place of wonder. This guy, WALL-E, is a great example of that. He finds beauty in the simplest things. But when he came in to lighting, we knew we had a big problem. We got so geeked-out on making WALL-E this convincing robot, that we made his binoculars practically optically perfect.
His binoculars are one of the most critical acting devices he has. He doesn’t have a face or even traditional dialogue, for that matter. So the animators were heavily dependent on the binoculars to sell his acting and emotions. We started lighting and we realized the triple lenses inside his binoculars were a mess of reflections. He was starting to look glassy-eyed.
Now, glassy-eyed is a fundamentally awful thing when you are trying to convince an audience that a robot has a personality and he’s capable of falling in love. So we went to work on these optically perfect binoculars, trying to find a solution that would maintain his true robot materials but solve this reflection problem.
So we started with the lenses. Here’s the flat-front lens, we have a concave lens and a convex lens. And here you see all three together, showing us all these reflections. We tried turning them down, we tried blocking them, nothing was working. You can see here, sometimes we needed something specific reflected in his eyes — usually Eve. So we couldn’t just use some faked abstract image on the lenses. So here we have Eve on the first lens, we put Eve on the second lens, it’s not working. We turn it down, it’s still not working.
And then we have our eureka moment. We add a light to WALL-E that accidentally leaks into his eyes. You can see it light up these gray aperture blades. Suddenly, those aperture blades are poking through that reflection the way nothing else has. Now we recognize WALL-E as having an eye. As humans we have the white of our eye, the colored iris and the black pupil. Now WALL-E has the black of an eye, the gray aperture blades and the black pupil. Suddenly, WALL-E feels like he has a soul, like there’s a character with emotion inside.
Later in the movie towards the end, WALL-E loses his personality, essentially going dead. This is the perfect time to bring back that glassy-eyed look. In the next scene, WALL-E comes back to life. We bring that light back to bring the aperture blades back, and he returns to that sweet, soulful robot we’ve come to love.
(Video) WALL-E: Eva?
There’s a beauty in these unexpected moments — when you find the key to unlocking a robot’s soul, the moment when you discover what you want to do with your life. The jellyfish in “Finding Nemo” was one of those moments for me.
There are scenes in every movie that struggle to come together. This was one of those scenes. The director had a vision for this scene based on some wonderful footage of jellyfish in the South Pacific. As we went along, we were floundering. The reviews with the director turned from the normal look-and-feel conversation into more and more questions about numbers and percentages. Maybe because unlike normal, we were basing it on something in real life, or maybe just because we had lost our way. But it had become about using our brain without our eyes, the science without the art. That scientific tether was strangling the scene.
But even through all the frustrations, I still believed it could be beautiful. So when it came in to lighting, I dug in. As I worked to balance the blues and the pinks, the caustics dancing on the jellyfish bells, the undulating fog beams, something promising began to appear. I came in one morning and checked the previous night’s work. And I got excited. And then I showed it to the lighting director and she got excited. Soon, I was showing to the director in a dark room full of 50 people.
In director review, you hope you might get some nice words, then you get some notes and fixes, generally. And then, hopefully, you get a final, signaling to move on to the next stage. I gave my intro, and I played the jellyfish scene. And the director was silent for an uncomfortably long amount of time. Just long enough for me to think, “Oh no, this is doomed.” And then he started clapping. And then the production designer started clapping. And then the whole room was clapping.
This is the moment that I live for in lighting. The moment where it all comes together and we get a world that we can believe in.
As consumers we only get to see the finished product, which in the case of Pixar feels flawless, but Danielle has taken us on a journey of challenges. The problems that had to be addressed in order to achieve that flawless feel. That expression, ‘This is the moment that I live for…’ is one that is contained in so many impactful personal stories, regardless of topic. You had a dream, but along the way got lost, or things didn’t work as planned, but with perseverance those issues were overcome.
We use math, science and code to create these amazing worlds. We use storytelling and art to bring them to life. It’s this interweaving of art and science that elevates the world to a place of wonder, a place with soul, a place we can believe in, a place where the things you imagine can become real — and a world where a girl suddenly realizes not only is she a scientist, but also an artist.
We come back to the beginning of Danielle’s story with a beautiful feeling of magic, of imagination, that all things are possible. In many cases the message within the story is revealed along the way, often at the midway point or just beyond, but that message can also appear in the final words of a story, as we see here.
Thank you.
[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]
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Aleeza Kazmi at The Moth from The Beacon School in New York City
/in Discrimination, Education, Identity, The Moth/by Mark LovettThe Moth has been hosting storytelling events for 20+ years, and the thousands of storytellers who have graced their stages are proof that every story is unique, and that the best stories come from our personal experiences.
I’ve always felt that storytelling should be a required course in high school, as it’s fundamental to how we formulate our thoughts and how we’ll express ourselves throughout our lives. I was delighted to discover this story by Aleeza Kazmi when she was still a student. (she’s a professional storyteller now)
Children of color often deal with issues related to identity when they’re growing up, and in this story, Aleeza recalls such an incident from when she was just six years old. Beyond her particular circumstances, it’s a narrative which speaks to the courage we sometimes need in order to express the fact that we are proud of who we are.
Transcript
So I’m six years old and I’m in the first grade and I’m sitting at a table with my three best friends and we’re all really similar. We all wear the same clothes from the children’s place that our mom’s by us, and we play on the monkey bars during recess and we play house underneath the playground at St. Catherine’s Park, which was behind our elementary school. All of our names start with A, there is Anna, Amanda, Ashia, and Aleeza. We’re working on self portraits, and this is sort of an icebreaker project of the first grade. My teacher, Ms. Harrington, presented it as a way to get to know each other’s faces. These were gonna be hung up on the wall, and I was really excited because we were on our third day of self portraits and we were going to color them in finally.
I was super excited about this because my mom had bought me a coloring book over the summer and I learned how to color inside the lines. I learned all these, yeah, really excited about that, and I learned all these really cool techniques for how to draw properly. I was basically young Picasso and I was ready to show off my skills to my friends. I knew this was an extremely special project because Ms. Harrington had brought out oil pastels. Every table got one box, and every box had one of each color. I love oil pastels because I used there really soft, and so I used to take them and pinch them between my fingers and feel them melt into my skin almost. Because there’s one of each color in every box you had to be patient and wait for your color to not be used, and the color I wanted was being used.
I was ready to color in my face, and all of my friends had colored in their face peach, and since we were all the same girl, I figured I would use peach as well. So finally, peach was available, and I color in my face and I’m going slowly and I’m watching the oil pastel melt into the paper and I color inside the lines. It’s beautiful, and I look down and this self portrait, this girl I had just drawn, is exactly how I see myself. It’s like I’m looking into a mirror, and I’m proud, and I feel Ms. Harrington, my teacher, looking over my shoulder, and I get really excited because Ms. Harrington loved it when people drew well. And I was like, she’s gonna say to me that she’s gonna hang it above her desk, so that when people came in, they knew that I drew this amazing portrait.
I was getting ready for her to compliment me, and instead she looks down and she says, “Aleeza, that’s not your color.” And I’m confused by this cuz I don’t understand how colors can belong to people. So I start panicking and I’m like, Was I not supposed to use oil pastels? You know, did I do something wrong? What did I do wrong? I couldn’t figure it out, and I couldn’t find a way to ask her.
She didn’t explain further, she just grabbed the oil pastel box and started looking through it. Didn’t find the color she was looking for. So she went to the crayon bin. Now, every elementary school had this infamous crayon bin where little bits and pieces of broken of crayon that were unwrapped and disgusting and mixed together over years and years and years and never went away.
And I never used crayons. I always used markers or color pencils or something. But Ms. Harrington went to the crayon bin, and she’s rummaging through it, and she pulls out this crayon, and it’s this nub of a brown crayon that’s unwrapped and gross. Ms. Jill Harrington hands it to me and she says, “Lisa, this is your color.”
I still don’t understand it because how can colors belong to people? But I can’t figure out a way to ask her, and so I take it and she tells me to color in my face, and so I do. But crayon and oil pastel don’t mix together and they’re not friends and they don’t wanna be on the same page together. So I’m pushing in this crayon and I’m going in all different directions and trying to make it mix with the peach, but it’s not doing it.
I’m coloring outside of the lines now and I’ve colored into my eye and my lips and now’s red on my chin. I’m panting, and Anna, Ashia and Amanda are all staring at me and I’m embarrassed. When I’m done, I look down and I’m this grotesque monster that can’t decide if it wants to be peach or brown. I wanna scream at Ms. Jill Harrington, “Please do not hang this up, I’ll do it again. I’ll do it your way this time.”
But she grabs my self portrait before I’m able to say anything, and she puts it into the pile with all of my even tone, beautiful peach friends, and it’s hung up on the wall. I go home that night and I ask my mom, “Why am I not allowed to be peach?” And she explains it to me as well as a mother can to a six year old who’s going through an identity crisis.
You know, I’m not peach and your dad isn’t peach. She does her best, but I still don’t understand it, and I don’t wanna ask her cuz I don’t wanna sound stupid, cuz everyone else seems to understand this concept of color, but I cannot wrap my head around it. So I put this idea on a shelf and I don’t think about it again until the sixth grade when I’m in a new school, and we’re all asking each other questions like, “Where did you go to elementary school and what’s your favorite book?” Just trying to get to know each other a little bit, and this one boy comes up to me and he asks me, “What race are you?” Which might be a complex question. Some people, they can’t look at me and know what race I am.
I didn’t know what race I was because I never really thought about it, so I’m trying to look for an answer. I think back to this Jill Harrington and that brown nubby crayon, and I tell him, “I’m brown.” And he looks at me, and he’s so confused, and he says, “What do you mean you’re brown? Brown isn’t a race.”
I find the words finally and they come up, and this little six year old me inside is screaming, and then now I’m screaming and I’m saying, “Who are you to tell me what I am? If I say I’m brown, then I’m brown and deal with it.”
So this boy never spoke to me again, which is fine, because I finally found the words and was able to stand up for myself.
Watch Aleeza’s video, make some notes about what impressed you, then read the manuscript and watch again. You’ll see and hear it differently the 2nd time around. You will also notice a bit of editing. To avoid the talk from reading as a run-on sentence, the word ‘and’ was removed in several places.
[Note: all comments are my opinions, not those of the speaker, or The Moth, or anyone else on the planet. In my view, every story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these posts is to inspire storytellers to become better storylisteners and to think about how their stories can become more impactful.]
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Tara Clancy on The Moth Mainstage at the Avram Theater
/in Humor, Life Lessons, Personal Stories, The Moth/by Mark LovettThe Moth has been hosting storytelling events for 20+ years, and the thousands of storytellers who have graced their stages are proof that every story is unique, and that the best stories come from our personal experiences.
I recently came across this video and knew that I had to share it as an example of how the lessons that we learn early on in life can change the way we see the world and our place in it. For Tara Clancy, one such lesson involved a shift from fear to choice.
She does so with a sharp sense of humor while taking us back five generations to set the stage for stories about her mom, her upbringing in Brooklyn, and a most unusual set of after dinner conversations.
It’s a revealing look at straddling cultures, spanning generations, and absorbing the wisdom that comes from interesting dialogues. Consider the experiences as you grew up which shifted your outlook on life. I’ll bet there’s a great story there.
Transcript
I am a fifth generation native New Yorker. Yes. And while there is definitely something cool about that, there is also actually a downside. Like there was this moment when it occurred to me that while many other American families also first landed in New York City for the most part, at some point they kept going, pioneering their way west with little more than the rags on their backs and all of that. Meanwhile, my own family got off a boat, took two steps, looked around, and were like, good enough for me, forever.
I come from a place where discovering the great unknown means New Jersey. All right, well, it didn’t take me too long to realize that the reason for all of this was mostly fear, and that that fear pervaded everything. Where you live, what you do for a living, you just find the first solid thing and you don’t risk going any further. But as it turned out, my mother was something of a pioneer herself, although not without her share of false starts. So at 20 years old she had hardly been outside of Brooklyn, and when she did finally leave a year later, it was only because she married a guy from Queens, which she then called the country.
Anyway, they had a baby – me. But by the time I was two they had divorced, and to make a little extra money afterwards she had to take on a weekend job cleaning apartments. So the very first was this duplex filled with antiques and artwork and Manhattan skyline views. But as it winds up, it would be her last, because over the course of one year, she would go from being the cleaning lady, to the secretary, to the girlfriend of the multimillionaire who owned it, named Mark. They never wound up living together full time. For one, they were both divorced, so it was just kind of a been there, done that.
But also my mother had this philosophy, which was just that if you take somebody’s money, you have to take their advice. And so when it came to raising me, she wanted to do it her way, which she felt like had to be on her dime. So she would go on to spend every weekend with him, and then every weekday back home in Queens living this dual life for the next 22 years. And on the weekends when I wasn’t with my dad, I was right there with her. So together my mother and I had kind of become superwomen, able to jump social strata in a single bound.
Because of my mother’s plan my life was really never very different than anybody else’s around me. I wasn’t sent to some special school or moved to a penthouse, so I just kind of grew into your typical queen’s teenager. I was a walking cliche in every other way, except for the fact that I still spent every odd weekend talking and talking with this brilliant art collecting, croquet playing man at his mansion in Bridge Hampton. And when I say talking and talking with him, I actually really mean it. I don’t just mean we just sort of made some chit chat. I mean that after dinner, every odd Saturday, for 20 years of my life, he would look at me and ask me some enormous question. Something like, “If I were to tell you that the universe was infinite, how would that make you feel?”
And for that when I was five years old, right? But I just lived for it. And we would just talk and talk, and sometimes my mother would, would kind of leave us to it, and then she would come back in an hour later and she would be like, “Are you too gonna talk about the moon and the stars all night?” And that’s actually what she came to call them. Our Moon and Stars talks. So by 16 years old, like every other teenager, I didn’t wanna be away from my friends for five minutes, let alone a whole weekend. And so for the first time, I decided to ask Mark if they could come along. So I give him a call, ring, “Mark speaking, hey, it’s Tara. Would it be okay if I brought some friends this weekend? Yeah, that’d be fine.” Click.
He wasn’t one for small talk, right? So the problem wasn’t him. The problem was that some of my friends had no idea about any of this. Now, it really wasn’t that I was trying to hide it. It’s just that the details weren’t always easy to slip into conversation. Truly, the only thing I could compare having to tell them about all this stuff is just kind of like my own coming out. You know? I’d sit them down and I’d be like, “I have something to tell you, and I hope you find it in your heart to accept me. But I know a rich guy.”
But truly, I wanted them to come. I didn’t want them to be embarrassed, so I knew that I had to explain some things to them. And so literally here I am in the schoolyard one day at recess, and in one corner kids are just beating the crap out of each other. It’s how we do recess in Queens, right? And in the other corner I’ve pulled aside my friend who I’ve invited, Lynette, and I’m just sitting there and I’m trying to explain to her what it means to go antiquing.
But before you know it, there we are. Me, Lynette, her boyfriend Rob, piled into this little red civic. We’re flying down the highway heading from Hollis to here, to the Hamptons. And just for brevity’s sake, we’ll say Lynette’s, like Rosie Perez, Rob’s like Eminem. They’re in the front. I’m in the back, and as we’re getting closer I’m getting more and more nervous, and I’m trying to think of everything I haven’t explained, and I’m like, “Oh my God, did I tell you about the ketchup? The ketchup? Listen, you can’t put the ketchup bottle on the table. You gotta take the ketchup out of the bottle. You gotta put it in a little bowl with a spoon. Don’t ask.” And then I keep getting nervous, and more things, that I’m like, “Oh, guys, I got another one. I forgot to tell you guys. Listen, there’s no TV there.” And they’re like, “Dear God, what does he do all day?”
So that kind of led me to explain what we did after dinner, which wasn’t watch TV, it was the talks, the moon and the stars talks. So I should have said while I loved these talks, they actually were not for the faint of heart, meaning Mark didn’t care if you were some kid unaccustomed to this kind of thing. He was going to talk and argue with you like you were his peer and fully expect you to keep up. I just didn’t know if my friends were gonna be into that or if he was gonna be into them, but before you know it, too late, there we are, pulling into the driveway.
So the most shocking thing you first saw at Mark’s house actually was not the beautiful hand laid stone pool, or this enormous regulation croquet court, or even the historic farmhouse. It was just Mark himself. He was six foot 10, yeah, six foot 10. So here are these two kids from Queens, like, is that a man or is that oak tree wearing Chinos?
Likely because everyone completely ignored my stupid paranoia and were just themselves the day went without a hitch. But after dinner that night, when I knew the questions were coming, I couldn’t help but to be a little bit nervous again, and then of course, he just goes for it. He looks up at them and he’s like, “So if we were to presume we could fix all of the societal ills right here and now, where would you begin? Go.”
I mean, you guys gotta understand. Nobody is asking us these kinds of questions, right? And even though we are at an age where you might be starting to think bigger picture, you might be starting to think about what you wanna do for a living, we come from a world where it only ever felt like there were two job options. It was cop, not a cop. What else could there be really? You know, really.
Sort of like your parents, you took the first solid city job that came along and you held on for dear life, and you were proud, and you did your best, and you did it forever. So solving society’s ills. But of course, soon as he says it, I kind of look down, take this breath, and then I hear Lynette say something, and I look up, and now Rob has disagreed with her. And now Mark is sort of nodding along and just like that, it’s on.
And not just that one time. Most of these friends would come back for many more of these talks over the years. And while in a way it was this beautiful thing, of course, in another way it was a little bit sad because what most of them would tell you now is that those talks forever changed the way we thought of ourselves.
They really made you think that maybe there was a little more to you than you knew. And for some, certainly not all, but definitely for me, they even made you think like, boy, you know, if A) I like talking about these big things and B) the universe is infinite, then C) there’s gotta be some more job options than bus driver.
But truly, I think this experience gave us something that unfortunately I know my parents didn’t have. And that’s just when we came to that crossroad in life the next couple of years, we had the confidence to know that we had a choice. And so today I live in a whole other world, Manhattan, a whopping 20 minutes away from where I grew up. But that’s not because of fear. That’s my choice. Thank you.
Watch Tara’s video, make some notes about what impressed you, then read the manuscript and watch again. You’ll see & hear differently the 2nd time around.
[Note: all comments are my opinions, not those of the speaker, or The Moth, or anyone else on the planet. In my view, every story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these posts is to inspire storytellers to become better storylisteners and to think about how their stories can become more impactful.]
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Sangeeta Bhatia: This tiny particle could roam your body to find tumors @ TED Talks Live
/in Health, Science, TED, TED Talk/by Mark LovettTED Talks Live were held at The Town Hall Theater in NYC, in November of 2015. I had the pleasure of attending all six nights to hear speakers present impactful Ideas Worth Spreading. This post is an analysis of a talk by Sangeeta Bhatia that explores new and smaller solutions in the fight against cancer.
Watch Sangeeta’s TED Talk. At one level her talk is rather technical, as it involves the latest, most advanced science, but her story allows the audience to see how the concept works by way of analogy, description, and visuals. If you’re trying to convey a complex idea to a public audience, this is a great example of how that can be accomplished.
Transcript
(my notes in red)
In the space that used to house one transistor, we can now fit one billion. That made it so that a computer the size of an entire room now fits in your pocket. You might say the future is small.
One way to open a technology story is by making a statement directly related to your topic, but another technique is to offer an analogy that describes something completely different, but that shares a common feature. In this case, the feature highlighted is ‘small’, and it will remain a theme throughout her talk.
As an engineer, I’m inspired by this miniaturization revolution in computers. As a physician, I wonder whether we could use it to reduce the number of lives lost due to one of the fastest-growing diseases on Earth: cancer. Now when I say that, what most people hear me say is that we’re working on curing cancer. And we are. But it turns out that there’s an incredible opportunity to save lives through the early detection and prevention of cancer.
The focus pivots from computers to cancer, and Sangeeta lets the audience know that she’ll be exploring how miniaturization may play a role in the detection and prevention of cancer. We see that connection in another way, by saying she’s an ‘engineer’ and a ‘physician’.
If you click on the link to her bio, you’ll see that’s true, but in a short story there is rarely the time to go into any greater detail. And that’s something to remember. Two details change how we think about her, and yet it only took seconds to do so. Brief can still have impact.
Worldwide, over two-thirds of deaths due to cancer are fully preventable using methods that we already have in hand today. Things like vaccination, timely screening and of course, stopping smoking. But even with the best tools and technologies that we have today, some tumors can’t be detected until 10 years after they’ve started growing, when they are 50 million cancer cells strong. What if we had better technologies to detect some of these more deadly cancers sooner, when they could be removed, when they were just getting started?
Sangeeta uses two statistics to describe characteristics of tumors that few people outside the field of medicine would know. In this case, they point to the need for early detection. Before 10 years have passed, and before there are 50 million cancer cells. This type of framing applies to a range of scientific topics, as well as social problems. It follows the logic of, ‘the sooner we know, the better’. Consider whether this technique might apply to your story.
Let me tell you about how miniaturization might get us there. This is a microscope in a typical lab that a pathologist would use for looking at a tissue specimen, like a biopsy or a pap smear. This $7,000 microscope would be used by somebody with years of specialized training to spot cancer cells. This is an image from a colleague of mine at Rice University, Rebecca Richards-Kortum. What she and her team have done is miniaturize that whole microscope into this $10 part, and it fits on the end of an optical fiber. Now what that means is instead of taking a sample from a patient and sending it to the microscope, you can bring the microscope to the patient. And then, instead of requiring a specialist to look at the images, you can train the computer to score normal versus cancerous cells.
Sangeeta comes back to the concept of smaller (miniaturization) as a potential solution. And using a story block about someone else – one of her colleagues – she is able to highlight a solution that improves the detection of cancer. The framing of ‘instead of…’ with ‘you can…’ illustrates the notion that an existing process can be improved by implementing a new idea.
Now this is important, because what they found working in rural communities, is that even when they have a mobile screening van that can go out into the community and perform exams and collect samples and send them to the central hospital for analysis, that days later, women get a call with an abnormal test result and they’re asked to come in. Fully half of them don’t turn up because they can’t afford the trip. With the integrated microscope and computer analysis, Rebecca and her colleagues have been able to create a van that has both a diagnostic setup and a treatment setup. And what that means is that they can do a diagnosis and perform therapy on the spot, so no one is lost to follow up.
Once a new technology (or a solution of any sort) has been developed, can your story talk about how it worked? If you don’t have a story block that validates your idea, then it remains theoretical. Which is sometimes the case. Your story’s narrative can take us to the present moment with a desire to take the next step in the future. Probes have been to Mars, but humans haven’t, so your story may end with your vision of the future.
That’s just one example of how miniaturization can save lives. Now as engineers, we think of this as straight-up miniaturization. You took a big thing and you made it little. But what I told you before about computers was that they transformed our lives when they became small enough for us to take them everywhere. So what is the transformational equivalent like that in medicine? Well, what if you had a detector that was so small that it could circulate in your body, find the tumor all by itself and send a signal to the outside world? It sounds a little bit like science fiction. But actually, nanotechnology allows us to do just that. Nanotechnology allows us to shrink the parts that make up the detector from the width of a human hair, which is 100 microns, to a thousand times smaller, which is 100 nanometers. And that has profound implications.
Having taken the ‘smaller’ idea to one level, Sangeeta takes us to place that, as she admits, ‘sounds a bit like science fiction’. In this case, ‘smaller’ is not just some smaller device, but something so small that we can’t even see it. This is common for science related talks, as processes which occur at the the molecular or nano level, can only be imagined, which means the responsibility falls on the storyteller to bring their audience into that world.
It turns out that materials actually change their properties at the nanoscale. You take a common material like gold, and you grind it into dust, into gold nanoparticles, and it changes from looking gold to looking red. If you take a more exotic material like cadmium selenide — forms a big, black crystal — if you make nanocrystals out of this material and you put it in a liquid, and you shine light on it, they glow. And they glow blue, green, yellow, orange, red, depending only on their size. It’s wild! Can you imagine an object like that in the macro world? It would be like all the denim jeans in your closet are all made of cotton, but they are different colors depending only on their size.
And the way Sangeeta does that, is to compare a property that exists at such a small scale to something that everyone can relate to – their denim jeans – different size equals different color. While jeans are completely different than nanoparticles, we still get the picture.
So as a physician, what’s just as interesting to me is that it’s not just the color of materials that changes at the nanoscale; the way they travel in your body also changes. And this is the kind of observation that we’re going to use to make a better cancer detector.
So let me show you what I mean. This is a blood vessel in the body. Surrounding the blood vessel is a tumor. We’re going to inject nanoparticles into the blood vessel and watch how they travel from the bloodstream into the tumor. Now it turns out that the blood vessels of many tumors are leaky, and so nanoparticles can leak out from the bloodstream into the tumor. Whether they leak out depends on their size. So in this image, the smaller, hundred-nanometer, blue nanoparticles are leaking out, and the larger, 500-nanometer, red nanoparticles are stuck in the bloodstream. So that means as an engineer, depending on how big or small I make a material, I can change where it goes in your body.
In my lab, we recently made a cancer nano detector that is so small that it could travel into the
tumorbody and look for tumors. We designed it to listen for tumor invasion: the orchestra of chemical signals that tumors need to make to spread. For a tumor to break out of the tissue that it’s born in, it has to make chemicals called enzymes to chew through the scaffolding of tissues. We designed these nanoparticles to be activated by these enzymes. One enzyme can activate a thousand of these chemical reactions in an hour. Now in engineering, we call that one-to-a-thousand ratio a form of amplification, and it makes something ultrasensitive. So we’ve made an ultrasensitive cancer detector.Once again, we have an example of how the idea becomes real, and we also come back to more of Sangeeta’s personal story, of what is happening in her laboratory. Instead of an ultra-technical description of what the tumor’s enzymes actually do, she uses a visual metaphor of how they ‘chew through’ the ’tissues’. They don’t have teeth, of course, but listeners make the connection and realize that the enzyme has a way to get through, and that’s all the audience needs to understand in order for Sangeeta to continue with the narrative.
OK, but how do I get this activated signal to the outside world, where I can act on it? For this, we’re going to use one more piece of nanoscale biology, and that has to do with the kidney. The kidney is a filter. Its job is to filter out the blood and put waste into the urine. It turns out that what the kidney filters is also dependent on size. So in this image, what you can see is that everything smaller than five nanometers is going from the blood, through the kidney, into the urine, and everything else that’s bigger is retained. OK, so if I make a 100-nanometer cancer detector, I inject it in the bloodstream, it can leak into the tumor where it’s activated by tumor enzymes to release a small signal that is small enough to be filtered out of the kidney and put into the urine, I have a signal in the outside world that I can detect.
The use of visual images is critical here, as they show, in graphic terms, what is happening. If the audience had to figure that out on their own, most of them would be lost. One of the most important uses of static or motion images is to say more than the speaker is saying.
OK, but there’s one more problem. This is a tiny little signal, so how do I detect it? Well, the signal is just a molecule. They’re molecules that we designed as engineers. They’re completely synthetic, and we can design them so they are compatible with our tool of choice. If we want to use a really sensitive, fancy instrument called a mass spectrometer, then we make a molecule with a unique mass. Or maybe we want make something that’s more inexpensive and portable. Then we make molecules that we can trap on paper, like a pregnancy test. In fact, there’s a whole world of paper tests that are becoming available in a field called paper diagnostics.
Alright, where are we going with this? What I’m going to tell you next, as a lifelong researcher, represents a dream of mine. I can’t say that’s it’s a promise; it’s a dream. But I think we all have to have dreams to keep us pushing forward, even — and maybe especially — cancer researchers.
I’m going to tell you what I hope will happen with my technology, that my team and I will put our hearts and souls into making a reality. OK, here goes. I dream that one day, instead of going into an expensive screening facility to get a colonoscopy, or a mammogram, or a pap smear, that you could get a shot, wait an hour, and do a urine test on a paper strip. I imagine that this could even happen without the need for steady electricity, or a medical professional in the room. Maybe they could be far away and connected only by the image on a smartphone.
Now I know this sounds like a dream, but in the lab we already have this working in mice, where it works better than existing methods for the detection of lung, colon and ovarian cancer. And I hope that what this means is that one day we can detect tumors in patients sooner than 10 years after they’ve started growing, in all walks of life, all around the globe, and that this would lead to earlier treatments, and that we could save more lives than we can today, with early detection.
Related to the previous comment about people going to Mars, Sangeeta takes the narrative beyond the laboratory and tells us her ‘what if’ story, which is a type of ‘better future’ story block. Anyone proposing a solution to a problem is, in effect, saying, ‘what if we implemented my solution? if we did, the world could be better for the following reasons’.
Many times speakers will conclude their story with an emphatic statement, along the lines of, ‘the world will be better’. You have to decide whether to frame your statement as a ‘could’ or a ‘will’. Just know that the audience may have their own opinion on the topic.
By using words such as ‘dream’ and ‘hope’, Sangeeta is clear on this point.
Thank you.
[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]
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Sam Kass: Want kids to learn well? Feed them well @ TED Talks Live
/in Education, Health, TED, TED Talk/by Mark LovettTED Talks Live were held at The Town Hall Theater in NYC, in November of 2015. I had the pleasure of attending all six nights to hear speakers present impactful Ideas Worth Spreading. This post is an analysis of a talk by Sam Kass about the connection between proper nutrition and success in childhood education.
Watch Sam’s TED Talk. The issues related to proper nutrition and the quality of a child’s education are complex, but Sam provides us with an example of one such solution that has seen positive results. But this talk is also about the choices that storytellers must make in regards to focus and impact.
Transcript
(my notes in red)
I am a chef and a food policy guy, but I come from a whole family of teachers. My sister is a special ed teacher in Chicago. My father just retired after 25 years teaching fifth grade. My aunt and uncle were professors. My cousins all teach. Everybody in my family, basically, teaches except for me.
They taught me that the only way to get the right answers is to ask the right questions. So what are the right questions when it comes to improving the educational outcomes for our children? There’s obviously many important questions, but I think the following is a good place to start: What do we think the connection is between a child’s growing mind and their growing body? What can we expect our kids to learn if their diets are full of sugar and empty of nutrients? What can they possibly learn if their bodies are literally going hungry? And with all the resources that we are pouring into schools, we should stop and ask ourselves: Are we really setting our kids up for success?
We know about chefs, and teachers, but the phrase ‘food policy guy’ is a bit unusual, and that has the audience wondering where his story will take them. Leveraging what he learned from the teachers in his family, Sam asks a series of questions which outline his narrative. Beyond serving as a precursor for his story, the technique of opening a story with questions can also engage the audience and get their cognitive wheels turning.
Now, a few years ago, I was a judge on a cooking competition called “Chopped.” Four chefs compete with mystery ingredients to see who can cook the best dishes. Except for this episode — it was a very special one. Instead of four overzealous chefs trying to break into the limelight — something that I would know nothing about — (Laughter) these chefs were school chefs; you know, the women that you used to call “lunch ladies,” but the ones I insist we call “school chefs.” Now, these women — God bless these women — they spend their day cooking for thousands of kids, breakfast and lunch, with only $2.68 per lunch, with only about a dollar of that actually going to the food. In this episode, the main-course mystery ingredient was quinoa. Now, I know it’s been a long time since most of you have had a school lunch, and we’ve made a lot of progress on nutrition, but quinoa still is not a staple in most school cafeterias.
Many people will have seen Sam on television, but for those that have not, his quick mention of that fact tells us that he’s not just a chef (he told us that in his opening line) but a chef who is good enough to be a judge for a cooking competition. Often times you can provide a single sentence that says a lot about who you are in connection to the story you’re telling.
So this was a challenge. But the dish that I will never forget was cooked by a woman named Cheryl Barbara. Cheryl was the nutrition director at High School in the Community in Connecticut. She cooked this delicious pasta. It was amazing. It was a pappardelle with Italian sausage, kale, Parmesan cheese. It was delicious, like, restaurant-quality good, except — she basically just threw the quinoa, pretty much uncooked, into the dish. It was a strange choice, and it was super crunchy. So I took on the TV accusatory judge thing that you’re supposed to do, and I asked her why she did that.
Cheryl responded, “Well, first, I don’t know what quinoa is.” (Laughter) “But I do know that it’s a Monday, and that in my school, at High School in the Community, I always cook pasta.”
See, Cheryl explained that for many of her kids, there were no meals on the weekends. No meals on Saturday. No meals on Sunday, either. So Cheryl cooked pasta because she wanted to make sure she cooked something she knew her children would eat. Something that would stick to their ribs, she said. Something that would fill them up. Cheryl talked about how, by the time Monday came, her kids’ hunger pangs were so intense that they couldn’t even begin to think about learning. Food was the only thing on their mind. The only thing. And unfortunately, the stats — they tell the same story.
This story block is about someone other than Sam. In this case, it’s someone that he has met and interacted with, so he could tell it from personal experience, but we are basically in the shoes of this other person. Think about the people you have met that could be part of your narrative. Capture those as current or future story blocks. Some speakers have dozens of such stories to draw on.
So, let’s put this into the context of a child. And we’re going to focus on the most important meal of the day, breakfast. Meet Allison. She’s 12 years old, she’s smart as a whip and she wants to be a physicist when she grows up. If Allison goes to a school that serves a nutritious breakfast to all of their kids, here’s what’s going to follow. Her chances of getting a nutritious meal, one with fruit and milk, one lower in sugar and salt, dramatically increase. Allison will have a lower rate of obesity than the average kid. She’ll have to visit the nurse less. She’ll have lower levels of anxiety and depression. She’ll have better behavior. She’ll have better attendance, and she’ll show up on time more often. Why? Well, because there’s a good meal waiting for her at school. Overall, Allison is in much better health than the average school kid.
So what about that kid who doesn’t have a nutritious breakfast waiting for him? Well, meet Tommy. He’s also 12. He’s a wonderful kid. He wants to be a doctor. By the time Tommy is in kindergarten, he’s already underperforming in math. By the time he’s in third grade, he’s got lower math and reading scores. By the time he’s 11, it’s more likely that Tommy will have to have repeated a grade. Research shows that kids who do not have consistent nourishment, particularly at breakfast, have poor cognitive function overall.
Here we have two more stories of other people – both designed to illustrate the connection between educational success and healthy nutrition – with one having a positive outcome, while the other outcome is negative. The use of contrasting stories is a common technique, used to show what happens when one path is taken over the other.
Sometimes these paths are imposed – in this case we’re dealing with children who don’t really have a choice – but in other situations the path is chosen – an adult who chooses to eat too much, or drink too much, or smoke cigarettes. In either case, the audience knows which is the better path, but they also know there are challenges to taking that path. This dilemma sets up the next phase of the story.
So how widespread is this problem? Well, unfortunately, it’s pervasive. Let me give you two stats that seem like they’re on opposite ends of the issue, but are actually two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, one in six Americans are food insecure, including 16 million children — almost 20 percent — are food insecure. In this city alone, in New York City, 474,000 kids under the age of 18 face hunger every year. It’s crazy.
On the other hand, diet and nutrition is the number one cause of preventable death and disease in this country, by far. And fully a third of the kids that we’ve been talking about tonight are on track to have diabetes in their lifetime.
Now, what’s hard to put together but is true is that, many times, these are the same children. So they fill up on the unhealthy and cheap calories that surround them in their communities and that their families can afford. But then by the end of the month, food stamps run out or hours get cut at work, and they don’t have the money to cover the basic cost of food.
Sam offers a statistical story block to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem. It’s very shocking to hear that nearly a half million kids in New York City face hunger every year. Are there statistics that can help support your narrative, that can highlight the importance of your message? You can use static numbers, or present a trend line if the numbers are going up or down.
But I would also like to mention Sam’s use of the phrase ‘diet and nutrition is the number one cause of preventable death and disease in this country, by far’. I found it equally shocking, yet it didn’t ring true for me. I’m not saying it was a false statement, but it seemed to be such a serious claim that it needed an explanation. What are the categories of ‘preventable death and disease’ that he’s talking about? What are the relevant statistics?
The point is, when you’re making a serious claim – about anything – consider whether you need to explain it further, or provide statistics, or quote the source of your claim.
But we should be able to solve this problem, right? We know what the answers are. As part of my work at the White House, we instituted a program that for all schools that had 40 percent more low-income kids, we could serve breakfast and lunch to every kid in that school. For free.
This program has been incredibly successful, because it helped us overcome a very difficult barrier when it came to getting kids a nutritious breakfast. And that was the barrier of stigma. See, schools serve breakfast before school, and it was only available for the poor kids. So everybody knew who was poor and who needed government help.
Now, all kids, no matter how much or how little their parents make, have a lot of pride. So what happened? Well, the schools that have implemented this program saw an increase in math and reading scores by 17.5 percent. 17.5 percent. And research shows that when kids have a consistent, nutritious breakfast, their chances of graduating increase by 20 percent. 20 percent. When we give our kids the nourishment they need, we give them the chance to thrive, both in the classroom and beyond.
The story now pivots from problem to solution, and we get one more slice of information about Sam – that he was working on this project at the White House. If he was to expand this story from its short 12 minute format to keynote length, these few words could become a significant story block of its own. The beauty of story blocks is how they can be expanded or contracted based on the time allowed.
Now, you don’t have to trust me on this, but you should talk to Donna Martin. I love Donna Martin. Donna Martin is the school nutrition director at Burke County in Waynesboro, Georgia. Burke County is one of the poorest districts in the fifth-poorest state in the country, and about 100 percent of Donna’s students live at or below the poverty line. A few years ago, Donna decided to get out ahead of the new standards that were coming, and overhaul her nutrition standards. She improved and added fruit and vegetables and whole grains. She served breakfast in the classroom to all of her kids. And she implemented a dinner program. Why? Well, many of her kids didn’t have dinner when they went home.
So how did they respond? Well, the kids, they loved the food. They loved the better nutrition, and they loved not being hungry. But Donna’s biggest supporter came from an unexpected place. His name was Eric Parker, and he was the head football coach for the Burke County Bears. Now, Coach Parker had coached mediocre teams for years. The Bears often ended in the middle of the pack — a big disappointment in one of the most passionate football states in the Union. But the year Donna changed the menus, the Bears not only won their division, they went on to win the state championship, beating the Peach County Trojans 28-14.
And Coach Parker, he credited that championship to Donna Martin.
This is a fun story block about how the football team improved their performance after the food program was improved, but it feels off topic to me and takes away from what I feel is the more important story of the link between nutrition and education. It’s a stylistic choice, of course, but when you want your story to have the most impact possible, carefully consider what content you will include, and what content to leave out. Especially when you have a very limited time to tell it. Some points that work in a long talk can be cut in a shorter talk.
When we give our kids the basic nourishment, they’re going to thrive. And it’s not just up to the Cheryl Barbaras and the Donna Martins of the world. It’s on all of us. And feeding our kids the basic nutrition is just the starting point. What I’ve laid out is really a model for so many of the most pressing issues that we face.
If we focus on the simple goal of properly nourishing ourselves, we could see a world that is more stable and secure; we could dramatically improve our economic productivity; we could transform our health care and we could go a long way in ensuring that the Earth can provide for generations to come. Food is that place where our collective efforts can have the greatest impact.
I think we would all agree with Sam that proper nutrition is linked to a wide range of global issues, but it’s unusual to begin on one topic – education – then expand it – athletics – and expand it further still – economics and health care. On the one hand, it speaks to how important the topic of nutrition is, but on the other hand, it strays from the opening topic. In the end, such decisions are up to the storyteller. I would simply suggest that you never stray from the intent of maximizing impact.
So we have to ask ourselves: What is the right question? What would happen if we fed ourselves more nutritious, more sustainably grown food? What would be the impact? Cheryl Barbara, Donna Martin, Coach Parker and the Burke County Bears — I think they know the answer.
Thank you guys so very much.
[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]
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Danielle Feinberg: The magic ingredient that brings Pixar movies to life @ TED Talks Live
/in Art, Science, Storytelling, TED, TED Talk/by Mark LovettTED Talks Live were held at The Town Hall Theater in NYC, in November of 2015. I had the pleasure of attending all six nights to hear speakers present impactful Ideas Worth Spreading. This post is an analysis of a talk by Danielle Feinberg on the magic ability of Pixar movies to capture our imagination.
Watch Danielle’s TED Talk. She not only speaks to her personal passion, but how her experiences at Pixar create films that touch the lives of millions. By tying the innocence of animation to the physics of lighting she provides a unique behind-the-scenes view of how art is blended with science, and how the dream that we imagine can become our reality.
Transcript
(my notes in red)
When I was seven years old, some well-meaning adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Proudly, I said: “An artist.” “No, you don’t,” he said, “You can’t make a living being an artist!”
For some people the life they lead as an adult began with a dream in childhood. I’ve found this to be true for a lot of artists, writers, musicians, even teachers and attorneys. It’s an opening that connects to an audience (we’ve all had dreams as children) and sets the stage for the narrative that follows.
My little seven-year-old Picasso dreams were crushed. But I gathered myself, went off in search of a new dream, eventually settling on being a scientist, perhaps something like the next Albert Einstein.
I have always loved math and science, later, coding. And so I decided to study computer programming in college. In my junior year, my computer graphics professor showed us these wonderful short films. It was the first computer animation any of us had ever seen. I watched these films in wonder, transfixed, fireworks going off in my head, thinking, “That is what I want to do with my life.” The idea that all the math, science and code I had been learning could come together to create these worlds and characters and stories I connected with, was pure magic for me.
Detours are another factor in many lives. What seems to be a change in direction ends up circling back, though often in a modified way. Danielle comes back to art, but from the perspective of computer graphics. Think about the detours in your personal story that an audience would appreciate hearing about.
Just two years later, I started working at the place that made those films, Pixar Animation Studios. It was here I learned how we actually execute those films. To create our movies, we create a three-dimensional world inside the computer. We start with a point that makes a line that makes a face that creates characters, or trees and rocks that eventually become a forest. And because it’s a three-dimensional world, we can move a camera around inside that world. I was fascinated by all of it. But then I got my first taste of lighting.
While Danielle’s personal experiences continue to be foundational to this story, there’s a shift at this point away from her and toward to topic of her talk – what brings Pixar movies to light. Using the visual on the screen behind her, the audience is pulled into the world of animation. The combination of image and words can transport people into your experience…
Lighting in practice is placing lights inside this three-dimensional world. I actually have icons of lights I move around in there. Here you can see I’ve added a light, I’m turning on the rough version of lighting in our software, turn on shadows and placing the light. As I place a light, I think about what it might look like in real life, but balance that out with what we need artistically and for the story. So it might look like this at first, but as we adjust this and move that in weeks of work, in rough form it might look like this, and in final form, like this.
…and in this story, there’s no substitute for the visual imagery. It is possible to describe how lighting works in the animation process without the accompanying visuals – and I always invite storytellers to think about how they would tell their story using only words – but in Danielle’s story the impact would only be a fraction of what she is able to achieve.
There’s this moment in lighting that made me fall utterly in love with it. It’s where we go from this to this. It’s the moment where all the pieces come together, and suddenly the world comes to life as if it’s an actual place that exists. This moment never gets old, especially for that little seven-year-old girl that wanted to be an artist.
As I learned to light, I learned about using light to help tell story, to set the time of day, to create the mood, to guide the audience’s eye, how to make a character look appealing or stand out in a busy set.
While the specific topic is lighting in animation, the revelation described applies across the creative spectrum. The ability of elements such as sound, color, texture, and perspective can tell a story of it’s own. Storytelling in general can tap into this attribute through description. Can you describe a scene in such a way as to enhance your story?
Did you see WALL-E? There he is. As you can see, we can create any world that we want inside the computer. We can make a world with monsters, with robots that fall in love, we can even make pigs fly.
While this is an incredible thing, this untethered artistic freedom, it can create chaos. It can create unbelievable worlds, unbelievable movement, things that are jarring to the audience.
So to combat this, we tether ourselves with science. We use science and the world we know as a backbone, to ground ourselves in something relatable and recognizable. “Finding Nemo” is an excellent example of this. A major portion of the movie takes place underwater. But how do you make it look underwater?
In early research and development, we took a clip of underwater footage and recreated it in the computer. Then we broke it back down to see which elements make up that underwater look. One of the most critical elements was how the light travels through the water. So we coded up a light that mimics this physics — first, the visibility of the water, and then what happens with the color. Objects close to the eye have their full, rich colors. As light travels deeper into the water, we lose the red wavelengths, then the green wavelengths, leaving us with blue at the far depths.
Danielle uses a science story block to explain how the folks at Pixar tapped into how light works to create realistic images that our eye accepts as real. Similarly, science can be used to expand up a number of other topics, from human emotions to the effects of climate change. Many times the science alone can come off as too technical, and thus, too boring, but when tied to a real life application / situation, the science comes to life.
In this clip you can see two other important elements. The first is the surge and swell, or the invisible underwater current that pushes the bits of particulate around in the water. The second is the caustics. These are the ribbons of light, like you might see on the bottom of a pool, that are created when the sun bends through the crests of the ripples and waves on the ocean’s surface. Here we have the fog beams. These give us color depth cues, but also tells which direction is up in shots where we don’t see the water surface. The other really cool thing you can see here is that we lit that particulate only with the caustics, so that as it goes in and out of those ribbons of light, it appears and disappears, lending a subtle, magical sparkle to the underwater.
You can see how we’re using the science — the physics of water, light and movement — to tether that artistic freedom. But we are not beholden to it. We considered each of these elements and which ones had to be scientifically accurate and which ones we could push and pull to suit the story and the mood.
We realized early on that color was one we had some leeway with. So here’s a traditionally colored underwater scene. But here, we can take Sydney Harbor and push it fairly green to suit the sad mood of what’s happening. In this scene, it’s really important we see deep into the underwater, so we understand what the East Australian Current is, that the turtles are diving into and going on this roller coaster ride. So we pushed the visibility of the water well past anything you would ever see in real life. Because in the end, we are not trying to recreate the scientifically correct real world, we’re trying to create a believable world, one the audience can immerse themselves in to experience the story.
It’s important to draw a distinction between the creation of a fictional story (one told in an animated movie) and the telling of a true story. While Danielle and the folks at Pixar have the ability to violate the laws of physics for artistic impact, storytelling with impact requires that only the truth be told. It will be your version of the truth, and other people may see things differently, but your story is authentic to the real world.
We use science to create something wonderful. We use story and artistic touch to get us to a place of wonder. This guy, WALL-E, is a great example of that. He finds beauty in the simplest things. But when he came in to lighting, we knew we had a big problem. We got so geeked-out on making WALL-E this convincing robot, that we made his binoculars practically optically perfect.
His binoculars are one of the most critical acting devices he has. He doesn’t have a face or even traditional dialogue, for that matter. So the animators were heavily dependent on the binoculars to sell his acting and emotions. We started lighting and we realized the triple lenses inside his binoculars were a mess of reflections. He was starting to look glassy-eyed.
Now, glassy-eyed is a fundamentally awful thing when you are trying to convince an audience that a robot has a personality and he’s capable of falling in love. So we went to work on these optically perfect binoculars, trying to find a solution that would maintain his true robot materials but solve this reflection problem.
So we started with the lenses. Here’s the flat-front lens, we have a concave lens and a convex lens. And here you see all three together, showing us all these reflections. We tried turning them down, we tried blocking them, nothing was working. You can see here, sometimes we needed something specific reflected in his eyes — usually Eve. So we couldn’t just use some faked abstract image on the lenses. So here we have Eve on the first lens, we put Eve on the second lens, it’s not working. We turn it down, it’s still not working.
And then we have our eureka moment. We add a light to WALL-E that accidentally leaks into his eyes. You can see it light up these gray aperture blades. Suddenly, those aperture blades are poking through that reflection the way nothing else has. Now we recognize WALL-E as having an eye. As humans we have the white of our eye, the colored iris and the black pupil. Now WALL-E has the black of an eye, the gray aperture blades and the black pupil. Suddenly, WALL-E feels like he has a soul, like there’s a character with emotion inside.
Later in the movie towards the end, WALL-E loses his personality, essentially going dead. This is the perfect time to bring back that glassy-eyed look. In the next scene, WALL-E comes back to life. We bring that light back to bring the aperture blades back, and he returns to that sweet, soulful robot we’ve come to love.
(Video) WALL-E: Eva?
There’s a beauty in these unexpected moments — when you find the key to unlocking a robot’s soul, the moment when you discover what you want to do with your life. The jellyfish in “Finding Nemo” was one of those moments for me.
There are scenes in every movie that struggle to come together. This was one of those scenes. The director had a vision for this scene based on some wonderful footage of jellyfish in the South Pacific. As we went along, we were floundering. The reviews with the director turned from the normal look-and-feel conversation into more and more questions about numbers and percentages. Maybe because unlike normal, we were basing it on something in real life, or maybe just because we had lost our way. But it had become about using our brain without our eyes, the science without the art. That scientific tether was strangling the scene.
But even through all the frustrations, I still believed it could be beautiful. So when it came in to lighting, I dug in. As I worked to balance the blues and the pinks, the caustics dancing on the jellyfish bells, the undulating fog beams, something promising began to appear. I came in one morning and checked the previous night’s work. And I got excited. And then I showed it to the lighting director and she got excited. Soon, I was showing to the director in a dark room full of 50 people.
In director review, you hope you might get some nice words, then you get some notes and fixes, generally. And then, hopefully, you get a final, signaling to move on to the next stage. I gave my intro, and I played the jellyfish scene. And the director was silent for an uncomfortably long amount of time. Just long enough for me to think, “Oh no, this is doomed.” And then he started clapping. And then the production designer started clapping. And then the whole room was clapping.
This is the moment that I live for in lighting. The moment where it all comes together and we get a world that we can believe in.
As consumers we only get to see the finished product, which in the case of Pixar feels flawless, but Danielle has taken us on a journey of challenges. The problems that had to be addressed in order to achieve that flawless feel. That expression, ‘This is the moment that I live for…’ is one that is contained in so many impactful personal stories, regardless of topic. You had a dream, but along the way got lost, or things didn’t work as planned, but with perseverance those issues were overcome.
We use math, science and code to create these amazing worlds. We use storytelling and art to bring them to life. It’s this interweaving of art and science that elevates the world to a place of wonder, a place with soul, a place we can believe in, a place where the things you imagine can become real — and a world where a girl suddenly realizes not only is she a scientist, but also an artist.
We come back to the beginning of Danielle’s story with a beautiful feeling of magic, of imagination, that all things are possible. In many cases the message within the story is revealed along the way, often at the midway point or just beyond, but that message can also appear in the final words of a story, as we see here.
Thank you.
[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]
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