RSA Animate grew from a free lecture series hosted by UK charity the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. In the style of TED, the American non-profit group that holds talks on new thoughts and innovations, the RSA’s lecture series aims to air exciting ideas from respected speakers on subjects from climate change to the credit crunch.
“The series was fine, but I thought it could be much more ambitious and cutting edge,” says Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA and the former head of Tony Blair’s policy unit. It was a junior member of staff who had the intuitive leap of combining the lectures with the work of an artist, Andrew Park, from the animation company Cognitive Media.
The result is a series of 12-minute videos in which we see Park’s speeded-up hand moving across a white background, drawing cartoons that illustrate the lecturer’s words, which we hear simultaneously. Park also writes out parts of the lecture in bold capitals. The images and text expand as the lecture progresses, so when the camera zooms out at the end, we see the talk illustrated in its entirety as a huge artwork.
The unpacking of difficult talks into an easy visual format has resulted in a surge of curiosity. The latest RSA Animate, released last week, The Divided Brain, was based on a lecture by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, in which he summarises his 750-page The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Tens of thousands have already viewed it.
“This is profound thinking, but the video is full of things which make you smile,” Taylor says. “Andrew has a remarkable ability to combine brilliant animation with humour and lightness of touch. The drawings almost have a 'Carry On’ element. They are full of a very British, irreverent, slightly scatological sense of humour.”
Read more at The Telegraph
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