July 23, 2009
Applied Physics Lab reaches out to middle-schoolers with freewheelin’ ‘Dylan Diatom’ animation
About to be eaten by a menacing, shrimp-like copepod, gentle Dylan Diatom is saved at the last second when an arctic cod slices up through the water and swallows the copepod with a satisfied snap of its mouth.
“Without us nothing would be happening. We’re supper for small animals like these creepy copepod. And bigger animals like fish eat them,” narrates Dylan in an animation just released by the multimedia lab at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. The six-minute short is titled, The Important Little Life of Dylan Diatom.
And diatoms — part of a family of ocean algae, most of which are too tiny to see without magnification — are important. For example they are thought to absorb carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, in amounts comparable to all the world’s tropical rain forests combined.
“You’ll never meet a nicer plant,” Dylan proclaims.
The animated short was the idea of Mike Steele, a senior oceanographer at the Applied Physics Laboratory and part of a group of U.S. scientists looking at past observations of phytoplankton growth in the Arctic Ocean in order to consider how climate change may alter such growth.
It’s work funded by the National Science Foundation, which means the scientists need to do public outreach about what they are studying.
“I’ve been giving quarterly lectures on the Arctic and climate change to students at the Art Institute of Seattle, which got me thinking about using the right side of my brain,” Steele says. “So, for outreach connected with this research, I thought it would be fun to produce a short animation that explains the life cycle of arctic plankton.”
The resulting animation is aimed at middle school students, but who can resist button-shaped Dylan with his expressive eyes and mouth and mitten-like hands?
“Obviously, diatoms don’t have such features, but the scientists allowed us some artistic license,” says Janet Olsonbaker, an engineer of multimedia programs at the lab who wrote and produced the short. “The tiny holes on Dylan’s face, though, are anatomically correct — well, animation style.”
During the short, Dylan is swept up in the spring melt, passes colonies of other single-cell plants, basks in the sun and is swept temporarily — and terrifyingly — back under the ice where it’s too dark for a plant to survive.
The animation was done by Anna Czoski, a UW undergraduate in digital arts and experimental media who has since graduated. She worked under the supervision of Olsonbaker and Troy Tanner, Applied Physics Laboratory software engineer and director of the short.
Olsonbaker researched the problem in the Arctic and collected pictures of all the elements from scientists so Czoski and Tanner could develop the most realistic environment for the movie, Olsonbaker says. It took several months for Czoski to accurately portray fish-eating movements, sea ice structure, water properties and move the characters within the ecosystem.
Animation software does not support all of the movements to communicate science effectively, Olsonbaker says. Czoski and Tanner had to use mathematical equations and rely on special geometric techniques.
The short is narrated by student Katrina Hamilton, with the UW schools of drama and music, and includes music.
Aside from taking the liberties with Dylan’s anatomy, Olsonbaker assured the accuracy of the script she wrote and images Czoski created by working with five scientists from a project producing an updated synthesis of marine primary production in the Arctic. Among them were Paty Matrai, with Bigelow Lab in Maine and principal investigator of the project, and Steele, who is not a plankton expert but instead studies currents and water movements that distribute plankton, which aren’t able to swim on their own, in the Arctic Ocean.
Climate change concerns the scientists on the project and the same is true of Dylan.
As scary as the hungry copepod and windy weather is, Dylan also is frightened talking about changes in arctic ice and waters that diatoms might face because of climate change.
“If enough of us diatoms kick the bucket because of a warming ocean then the guys who depend on us for food — they’re history.”
But Dylan isn’t kicking the bucket in this animated short. Instead he drifts together with his brethren on the waves at the end, proclaiming, “Even a little life like mine can be very important.”
Watch Dylan here. Learn more about the research on the Arctic Ocean ecosystem here.
