This has been a big week for We are Cognitive. The first episode of our new series, Talk To The Hand, has launched. In Episode 1, Andrew Park interviewed Matthew Taylor, NHS Confederation Chief Executive and previous RSA CEO. They talked about how Andrew first began working with the RSA and explored cultural theory. In this blog, Andrew reflects on the origins of whiteboard animation, the RSA Animates, visual storytelling and the journey that led to the creation of this new series.
The last RSA Animate aired five years ago. I didn’t know then that this would be the last of the longer form films I would make in the series. Although there was no clear-cut decision made to end the series, the RSA was changing their approach and their relationship with the format and were being guided by the audience. They wanted shorter and more social media friendly content.
It marked the end of a series that had created a whole new way of sharing and explaining complex and important information. We call this new way of explaining ideas ‘whiteboard animation’. If anything, this process and methodology has been the crystalising force for my creativity, allowing the influences that have shaped me as an artist to be channeled in a discipline that proved to be far more inclusive than any work that I had undertaken in my own private artistic practice.
Although the initial RSA Animates series finished, the company I created, We are Cognitive, was inextricably shaped by them. The technique, which was forged on the whiteboard, informed the direction of the company and how we approach complex information, make it easy to understand and engaging to watch. The organic process of making these individual whiteboard animations informed how to make these animations in general. The rapid growth of skills and techniques, as well as the team, was, in hindsight, quite extraordinary.
We have kept the essence of the Animates alive by creating several shorter whiteboard animations for the RSA and bringing this powerful way of communicating to almost every sector of society. Every innovation yields its imitators and in that time a lot of others have adopted our technique, starting their own whiteboard animation studios or creating software to try and capture the communicating power of our whiteboard films.
I still feel proud to have been there at the start, developing whiteboard animation and the toolkit that has shared so many ideas with the world. It was reflecting on its origin that planted the seed for Talk To The Hand. I have never stopped using whiteboard animation to bring important ideas to the screen. Indeed, I use drawing every day to help myself understand topics that I come across. With that in mind, I had a hankering to revisit some of those speakers I’d first met through the RSA, and to work with a whole new set of people – each with an idea that reshapes our understanding of the world. I wanted to help people engage more fully with this content and drill down in to the themes and explore them using the power of illustration and animation.
The history of whiteboard animation
Before my work on the RSA Animates, I’d worked as a ‘Scribe’, a visual recorder for meetings and events. I would argue that this is proof that some men can multi-task. This form of live content capture required me to listen to conversations in real time and map them out, converting their ideas or concepts in to illustrations, characters, metaphors and visual storytelling on to large workwalls. These tapestries of information helped to create a group memory for the participants of those conversations, an aide-memoir that helped each individual trigger memories of their understanding of the content.
It was from these roots that whiteboard animation grew; I combined the skills of a scribe with the ability whiteboards gave me to draw, erase and replace illustrations. For a while I had been trying to devise a way of making the scribe process work for recorded content. The idea being that video would be able to reach a far wider audience than the attendees of a meeting or a conference. I tried filming my work whilst listening to the content. No matter how quickly I tried to capture the content, I couldn’t draw fast enough. Things aren’t born in isolation. Good ideas actually evolve over time and are built via a series of slow hunches. This idea was realised by Stephen Johnson in his book, ‘Where good ideas come from’, and ironically we made this in to a whiteboard film shortly after inventing the process.
The RSA sent me an example from the New York Library – an artist doodling in a journal with a sped up hand along to a lecture. This was the ‘a-ha’ moment for me. I was no longer constrained by temporality. I could speed up time and have the hand follow in time with the voiceover. This combined with my mapping scribe style seemed to be a suitable solution to the brief.
Our first Animate for the RSA was completed with a basic camera set up, a flip cam. A camera with one button to record and stop filming. At that point I assumed that we would be making one film and so the investment in the technology was as economical as it could be. Also, bear in mind that the camera technology 10 years ago was leagues away from the quality we have now.
Today, things are very different at We are Cognitive. A talented team of producers, illustrators and animators employ the latest digital tools to help us create the unique whiteboard animations that help broadcast well-crafted knowledge tools to audiences worldwide. The skills and experience of the We are Cognitive team have allowed us to keep pushing and developing the ability of whiteboard animation to communicate with and engage audiences.
The difference is plain to see if you watch the first and then the last RSA Animates, but even that first Animate was a eureka moment, combining as it did those different skill sets and tools for the first time. When Matthew Taylor, then CEO of the RSA, saw it, he commented, "Oh my God, this is going to change everything." As much as I l love creating whiteboard animations, the real joy comes from reading the comments. Since their launch, the RSA Animates have had over 100 million views on YouTube, and still receive new comments. Often these are from people sharing how the speaker and the Animate have helped them understand something new, taken their knowledge to a new level or helped them apply a concept in real life. It is heartening to see that whiteboard animation is a useful tool. I still believe that it can be expanded upon and used in so many more ways.
Talk To The Hand and Cultural Theory
Whiteboard animation allows one to unpack information and layer it in space, allowing audiences to connect ideas and understand the bigger picture. Of course, first you need to understand these ideas, and this is what made Talk To The Hand Episode 1 so interesting for me.
Reconnecting with Matthew Taylor wasn’t just a chance to explain cultural theory, it was a chance to fix something that happened a long time ago. This was not the first time Matthew and I had approached cultural theory...
I was invited in to the RSA to see if I could visualise a presentation for Matthew. Matthew wanted me to illustrate some points on cultural theory, but through his explanation of the brief and my understanding of the topic – I think we both ended the meeting with the wrong idea.
I’d read books about cultural theory ahead of our meeting, but my work on Talk To The Hand has shown me that when trying to understand a subject like this, nothing but a full explanation will do when trying to break it down. The way Matthew presented the brief also made me very cautious about representing people in the illustrations. Matthew later said, “what I wanted to avoid was the notion that these are personality types.”
This led me down a very abstract route. An obvious touch point for me was the Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble cartoon, ‘The dot and the line: A romance in lower mathematics’. The genius of this film was it uses simple shapes to represent the complexity of characters involved in a love triangle. (A triangle doesn’t actually appear.)
I had also been exposed to a research study by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, which revealed via an animation using simple geometric shapes, that humans are hard-wired to impose narratives, even on simple forms. Perhaps I had arrived at the solution. Using shape for ‘character’.
Needless to say, this approach made Matthew’s ideas less than accessible and when I shared my ideas and approach with Matthew, they just didn’t gel. Thankfully, I was given another chance with the RSA and the Animate series was created shortly after this.
Nevertheless, that initial failure to be able to make something understandable irked me. I had unfinished business with cultural theory and it was an itch I needed to scratch. I knew that pictures could be the key to unlocking my understanding of the theory. I was now equipped with the experience and skills to be able to pull the subject apart and reconstruct it so it made sense to me. People finally made an appearance too. Ironically, so did those original shapes – reimagined as characters. It just goes to show, we never stop learning and developing.
The power of visual thinking and visual storytelling is highlighted throughout Talk To The Hand Episode 1. From layouts to the little details, I feel it makes the theories Matthew talks about understandable and relatable.
This is an important in part of sharing the knowledge and allowing people to fit it to their experiences. It also means that in moments of dense information, like Matthew’s 12-minute explanation of cultural theory, the information is reorganised and viewers are able to follow and take on board these new concepts without getting lost.
What drawing and animation allows one to do, like nothing else, is explore the impossible. It allows the audience to transcend and traverse meaning, from the theoretical to the more representational. From inside someone’s thoughts to the conjoining of abstract ideas to create a third meaning. Nothing is off limits.
The power of storytelling
For Matthew, storytelling has an important role to play in bridging the gap between his theory and the people he is trying to reach with it. Storytelling has been at the heart of whiteboard animation since the earliest RSA Animates; it uses narratives to frame the information in a way we can easily understand.
There is a good reason for this and the fact that as hard as you try, you can’t forget your friend’s frankly harrowing story from the pub the other night. Our brains are made for constructing and receiving stories; we have been doing it since the earliest cave paintings and most probably, long before.
This has been brought home by figures such as Paul Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Writing in Berkeley’s Greater Good magazine, he said, “stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts.”
Our ability to remember stories was brought home by my own Managing Senior Creative, Dan Stirrup, who vividly remembered the picture book, Mog the Forgetful Cat, from his own childhood when introducing it to his son. Storytelling is part of what it means to be human, it is part of our history and a foundation for our future.
In Talk To The Hand I tell stories, stories that inspire and inform. Although I can’t give too much away, I have spoken to some other very exciting future guests and I am already looking forward to working with them on their episodes. However, I am delighted that Matthew was my first guest and we had the opportunity to close a circle that was opened more than a decade ago.
Every explainer animation we create is a collaboration between us and our clients. Guided by each client’s essence, goals and message, we create scripted and visual storytelling that is informative, engaging, memorable and relatable. The result is a carefully crafted and bespoke explainer animation.