Miniature long-term memory assembly line for the SciAm series.
Hutton with production designer Mimi Bai preparing a model
of an eye for the SciAm series episode on vision.
They had a project they were cooking up with
Worth Publishers to produce a series of 30
short films to accompany intro to psychology
courses at most universities in North America,
to be paired with Worth’s textbooks. They
hired my company to produce all the films,
and it took us all of 2011 to script and then
shoot them. They’re anything but your typical
academic films. Each one is about eight to ten
minutes long. I worked with a great production
designer, Mimi Bai, and we built lots of stuff
for the films, like cardboard sets for the inner
ear, miniature brain worlds, factory assembly
lines for long-term memory with workers
dressed in Dickies coveralls, Rube Goldberg
machines to illustrate Pavlovian conditioning,
all interspersed with earnest interviews with
professors and scientists. We really got into
the process of finding visual metaphors and
analogies for the scientific concepts we were
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tasked with translating from the textbooks and
of making sure we created fun visuals that were
accurate too. The only way to see all of them
is to take one of these courses somewhere, but
there is a short trailer that is online and public:
https://vimeo.com/28141557.
SAiA: Your ongoing project, Bluebrain, which
you began in 2009, originally started as a
documentary following the work at the Blue
Brain Project in Switzerland, where they are
using scores of data and supercomputers to
reverse engineer the human brain into a digital
simulation. As the film developed, you have
necessarily also included the work of corollary
projects that have emerged with similar aims
including Obama’s BRAIN initiative, the Allen
Institute for Brain Science, and the connectome
work at MIT.
Needless to say this is a very exciting
project, and your 10-part film (four of which
are completed and viewable online) will
undoubtedly cover a decade of some of the
most important research that has ever occurred
in science. How did you decide to begin this
project, and what has your experience been like
in the making of it? Had you always planned on
scoring the film yourself? In such a long-term
project, what aspects of the film have gone as
expected, and what has been a surprise?
NH: I wanted to make the film when I saw
Henry Markram, the director of the Blue
Brain Project, give his TED talk in 2009. I had
just graduated from college that spring, and
my final two years there had been maxed out
with neuroscience classes, but I was sure that
I wanted make films, and it just felt natural to
look to the world of neuroscience for subject
matter. Markram’s declaration that he would
simulate a full human brain in 10 years was a
dramatic and controversial moment—it was
definitely making waves at the time, at least
in the scientific community. It all seemed
cinematic to me, especially how he was leaning
on visuals of brain simulations to make his
case to the public. I thought it would be an
interesting film experiment to match his 10year timeline with a film that would come to
life over the same 10 years, steadily, and without
knowing what its arc would be ahead of time.
I’ve always said to people about the project that
for me, from the point of view of making a film,
a failure to do this—to understand the brain
SciArt in America February 2014