Illustrating the Research

We worked with Illustrator John Cooper to create a short video about metamaterials for noise reduction.

Still image from the video. Credit: John Cooper.

One of the things researchers often wrestle with is creating clear and succinct explanations of their research for the non-specialist.  It can be extremely helpful to work with others; such as illustrators, teachers and performers, to eliminate jargon and create meaningful outputs that showcase the research.

When we wanted to make a short video about the design of metamaterials for noise reduction devices, we turned to illustrator and comedian John Cooper.

John has worked on projects for the University of Manchester before, creating work for the University’s School Governor Initiative and for the Children’s University of Manchester.  His humorous style lends clarity and informality to a topic.

We started from a blog post about the piece of research in question.  John used it to sketch out an initial storyboard proposal featuring noisy geese!  We then put together an initial script, from which John created a slideshow storyboard.

Sketches from the initial storyboard proposal. Credit: John Cooper, reproduced with kind permission from the artist

This project was completed during lockdown, so all our discussions were carried out over email or video conferencing.  Keeping the length of the script to a minimum was challenging, but after several iterations we arrived at the final version, which John narrates.

Here’s what John had to say, ‘I really enjoyed this project. The work the department does is fascinating, and it was an exciting challenge in generating visuals to complement their work on noise reduction.  It's good to learn new things while being creative.’
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Here’s the finished product.  Watch out for those geese!