Behind the scenes of Nature's Method of the Year video
Date:
Tuesday, 27 Jan
uary
2009 - 20:38 UTC
(Directed / produced by John Pavlus, co-produced by Christopher Mims, with lots of help from nearly a dozen scientists spread across three labs, as well as Adam Rutherford, Charlotte Stoddart and Veronique Kiermer at Nature. Editing by Andrew Cahill, camera by Steve Andrada.)
Hi everyone, my name’s Christopher, and I’m the co-founder of the production company that created, in collaboration with Nature Methods, a short film on Nature’s Method of the Year, which is Super-Resolution Microscopy.
Before your eyes glaze over, just watch the video — hopefully it speaks for itself.
If it leaves you wanting more, I thought I’d provide a few notes on the film, and also welcome all of you to give John Pavlus (who, as the only actual filmmaker at Small Mammal, is solely responsible for any watchability a film on a subject this dense possesses) and myself your feedback — good and bad — in the comments of this post.
Why You Should Care
More than 100 years ago, a mathematician and physicist named Ernst Abbe described the smallest possible object that could be resolved by a light microscope — which turns out to be about half the wavelength of light. That’s small enough to resolve cells, even parts of cells — but not molecules. For that you need electron microscopy, which means working with non-living samples.
This means molecule-scale resolution of living systems.
The ultimate impact of this discovery will almost undoubtedly be profound. Imagine being able to see — really see — the molecular machinery at the base of all life.
The Process
It turns out it’s really hard to compress an entire field — Super-Resolution Microscopy — into 5 minutes of video. (Keep in mind that normal people speak at something like 250 words per minute. Throw in a bunch of pauses, and that doesn’t leave you many words with which to describe something.)
It’s even harder when the story you’re trying to tell is spread across three Super-Resolution microscopy methods — STED, PALM and STORM.
We conducted three hour-long interviews of three different scientists — Dr. Stefan Hell, inventor of STED, Dr. Xiaowei Zhuang, inventor of STORM, and Dr. Lippincott-Schwartz, collaborator with Dr. Eric Betzig and Dr. Harald Hess on PALM; a few hours of shooting at the lab of Dr. Zhuang in Harvard, and weeks of research, pre-interviews and foraging for the high-resolution images and videos that are a product of super-resolution microscopy.
Then we took all this material back to the studio, cut the film together on paper, threw that out, and finally sat down, the three of us (John Pavlus, the director, Andrew Cahill, the editor, and myself) to build something that would be both accessible and faithful to the original scientific material. After about 20 hours of intensive editing, we produced what you saw above — an awful lot of work for just 5 minutes of video!
Impact
In the end, I think it was worth it. It was an enormously satisfying project. Whether or not we meet our ultimate goal — of bringing something potentially obscure and indecipherable to a wider audience of interested scientists and laypeople — remains to be seen. That’s why we’d love your feedback. Did the video adequately explain the Method? Did it hold your attention? Do you think people outside of science would find it accessible or interesting?
It is a nicely produced video, but boy, what a tall order it is to explain these techniques. Given the time constraints, I’d have to say that my biggest criticism is that when PALM/STORM are introduced, it takes much to long to get to the point where the viewer is actually told that what s/he is looking at is a photoswitchable fluorophore. The introduction talks a little too much about “spots” before we are finally introduced to the actual viewable entity.
Noah — I think this is a valid criticism. Watching the video now, with the benefit of temporal distance, that’s the part of the film when I start to squirm (it’s long, it tests the viewer’s patience).
I don’t know if “photoswitcchable fluorophore” would have made it past even the first round of edits, however, as part of our mandate was to produce something that would be comprehensible to scientists outside of the field (of biology, even).
That said, if we had it all to do over again, we might have abstracted the techniques involved even more — which might have offended people within the field, but might also have made the video more accessible to those outside of it. That’s the journalist in me talking, though, and not the scientist. ;)
Hi Noah, thanks for the feedback. As Christopher mentioned, my mission was to find that happy medium between “hard science”-ey enough for Nature readers and “layman-friendly” enough for everyone else—and doing that in an interview-driven format like this always comes down to playing Tetris with soundbites! (Which is part of the fun.) I agree with you, and I did try pretty hard to fit a mention of fluorophores earlier into that part of the film along with “spots”, but in the end the interview material didn’t provide the appropriate “Tetris pieces” to accomplish that.
Which isn’t to dodge, of course—I was, after all, the one conducting those interviews. :)
Speaking as a fan of the medium, I thought this was a great video, pitched very well for the non-expert scientist. I’m not surprised it took a lot of effort to get just this 5 minute film done! I particularly liked that you captured the huge enthusiasm that all the scientists involved had for their work.
I have not watched the video yet, but just wanted to stop by and welcome you to Nature Network blogging. I look forward to reading more of your posts, and will make a big effort to return and watch the videos – even though one of my personal time-saving rules is not to watch videos on the internet, this one looks as if it will be worth it – Stephen’s endorsement is a great incentive.
It is a nicely produced video, but boy, what a tall order it is to explain these techniques. Given the time constraints, I’d have to say that my biggest criticism is that when PALM/STORM are introduced, it takes much to long to get to the point where the viewer is actually told that what s/he is looking at is a photoswitchable fluorophore. The introduction talks a little too much about “spots” before we are finally introduced to the actual viewable entity.
Noah — I think this is a valid criticism. Watching the video now, with the benefit of temporal distance, that’s the part of the film when I start to squirm (it’s long, it tests the viewer’s patience).
I don’t know if “photoswitcchable fluorophore” would have made it past even the first round of edits, however, as part of our mandate was to produce something that would be comprehensible to scientists outside of the field (of biology, even).
That said, if we had it all to do over again, we might have abstracted the techniques involved even more — which might have offended people within the field, but might also have made the video more accessible to those outside of it. That’s the journalist in me talking, though, and not the scientist. ;)
Hi Noah, thanks for the feedback. As Christopher mentioned, my mission was to find that happy medium between “hard science”-ey enough for Nature readers and “layman-friendly” enough for everyone else—and doing that in an interview-driven format like this always comes down to playing Tetris with soundbites! (Which is part of the fun.) I agree with you, and I did try pretty hard to fit a mention of fluorophores earlier into that part of the film along with “spots”, but in the end the interview material didn’t provide the appropriate “Tetris pieces” to accomplish that.
Which isn’t to dodge, of course—I was, after all, the one conducting those interviews. :)
Speaking as a fan of the medium, I thought this was a great video, pitched very well for the non-expert scientist. I’m not surprised it took a lot of effort to get just this 5 minute film done! I particularly liked that you captured the huge enthusiasm that all the scientists involved had for their work.
I have not watched the video yet, but just wanted to stop by and welcome you to Nature Network blogging. I look forward to reading more of your posts, and will make a big effort to return and watch the videos – even though one of my personal time-saving rules is not to watch videos on the internet, this one looks as if it will be worth it – Stephen’s endorsement is a great incentive.
Hi Stephen, Maxine – thanks for chiming in. I would respond to comments on this blog only I just realized it wasn’t emailing me when they went up!
I’ll be putting up more science videos in the future. In fact that’s all this blog is about. :)