The first RSA Animate was launched back in 2010. Since then, we have created 21 Animates and five Minimates (animations on new ideas in a more concise style). As well as inspiring us to pioneer the whiteboard animation medium, we have loved the opportunity that these have given us to apply visual thinking to the ideas of great thinkers like Sir Ken Robinson, Carol Dweck, Ha Joon Chang, Michael Sandel and until very recently, the RSA’s own Matthew Taylor.
With all that in mind, we thought it was about time we took a minute (well, five) to at look what goes into an animation like this - from the research to the visual thinking. We interviewed Cognitive founder and RSA Animates creator, Andrew Park, and asked him about the latest Minimate, in which Matthew Taylor discusses Coordination Theory. You can watch the Making Of video here and read the interview below. We can’t wait to get deeper into the subject matter of Matthew’s Minimate in our Talk To The Hand series, coming soon. Watch the Minimate itself here.
Hello and welcome to this Making Of video. We've been wanting to make one of these for quite a while and it gives us the opportunity to go behind the scenes and explore the creative process of making the latest RSA whiteboard video. These are called RSA Minimates and this is our fifth Minimate. It features Matthew Taylor in his final address to the RSA as CEO. In it, Matthew looks at Coordination Theory, which is a subject he's been working with in various forms for over a decade. But here he crystallizes his thinking from a longer form book and explores what it could mean for the way society operates.
This isn’t the first time you have worked with Matthew Taylor on Coordination Theory. In fact, it’s the first project you and Matthew ever discussed. It’s ten years since that first project - what are the origins of this Minimate?
Well, we were recording our first episode of Talk To The Hand, which was a way of exploring more deeply the subject matters or the concepts and ideas of the people that I've worked with in the past. With Matthew, we made the 21st Century Enlightenment Animate 10 years ago. Matthew subsequently has said he hadn't really got these ideas out into public space satisfactorily the first time around. The first time around, he’d said to me that he didn't want any representation in the drawings because it was a theory about society at large. I said to him, well how can you have a theory about society without putting people in or representing them? There aren’t specific people that fit into those categories, it's about everyone, so he said he didn't want to try and recognize personality types. But with this Minimate, I really went to town and put people in there from all walks of life.
Coordination Theory has a big scope. Unlike some Minimates which have been focused on one area, this theory tackles society at large! How do you even begin to research a subject like this?
There are a number of different books that I accessed. Actually, there’s a pile of books in the film that come from the bibliography of Matthew’s book. Some of it is personal experience, some of it is watching things, reading things. They’re never quite an A to B process. You’re building this sort of tapestry of information. And you've got reference points for yourself, you're building a map of ideas that is constantly informing you. Feedback loops back to you, you’re like ‘oh right yeah’ and you put these markers down and sometimes they’re not right or you leave them there. You put a mark there and you come back to that. It’s sort of how it was when I was doing live scribing, you know. You would listen to conversations, live draw stuff and then put markers down. “I'll put that character there, come back to that while I’m listening to live conversation.” It’s the same with this really.
The thing that makes whiteboard animation so good at explaining ideas is the visual thinking. How do you turn your research and ideas into roughs and animatics?
I just start. You have a kind of a rough idea of what this thing is going to look like. Funnily enough, when we had that Talk To The Hand conversation and Matthew said don't illustrate any people, that filtered through a little bit. So, you know, for hierarchies I had the triangle, circles for the values base and then a single “I” for individual. I knew I’d structure it around those particular forms and just put the people around those shapes. I also had an idea about when Matthew mentions balance. It's about balancing those forms of coordination, so yeah, it's a bit on the nose, but a pair of scales was what I thought would be a device to frame things in the centre there. So I had a rough idea of how I thought it should look.
A lot can happen between the initial sketches and the final piece. How similar are the first roughs to the finished Minimate?
Broadly speaking, I would say 60 percent. When I make the initial capture, it's roughly there. The form is there and the layout is there, I would say. There's a structure to it. The beauty of having a really talented group of animators that you work with is that you can focus in on those details close up and then move about. Everything just starts packing in and it builds up and builds up until it is concluded.
There are lots of considerations when it comes to visual thinking. In the latest Minimate, which pieces of visual thinking stand out to you?
I really enjoyed drawing the juggernaut. When you think about a juggernaut you think about a big kind of convoy of lorries, but then I did a bit of research and I found out that it’s actually a religious vehicle from India, you know. It’s a temple on wheels. I had all these black and white photographs of these vehicles and thought that it would be fun to build a real-life technological juggernaut.
So many ideas and layers of meaning go into an animation like this, is a minimate ever overdone? Do you ever need to take things out?
In the last Minimate actually, I took a massive scene out. There’s a painting by Géricault called ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, which is a really iconic painting. It’s in the Louvre. But however clever I thought it was, it just didn't serve the needs of the story. In this one there is a painting reference to the Caspar David Friedrich painting. I don't think I've removed too much from this one, but I think what I have put in there are things relating specifically to the content Matthew has written about.
I hope we can continue to work with the ideas that shape our world and the people that come up with those ideas, have deeper dives with those ideas in our Talk To The Hand series, and you know obviously continue to work with the RSA and the fantastic speakers that they bring in.
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