Here at TED-Ed, we have been incredibly fortunate to work with talented and innovative animators from all over the world. But the TED-Ed Lesson by materials scientist, Ainissa Ramirez, marks a first for TED-Ed. The animation uses bologna — yes, the meat found in your sandwiches — doubling as atoms in a TED-Ed animation. The creative animator behind the lesson, Andy London, is a Brooklyn-based animator. He and his wife, Carolyn, are known for their 2004 short film “Backbrace,” that won Best Animation at the New York Television Festival and honorable mentions at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and the Woodstock Film Festival. 

So how did you land on using bologna as atoms in your TED-Ed Lesson? 

Well I went to a family dollar store and obsessively looked through candy — Reese’s, Smarties, Skittles, etc. Everything was too small or just didn’t work as atoms. So we went to the frozen food section of the family dollar store and found bologna. It was big enough and plain enough!

And I actually ate the bologna afterwards. Everybody got mad at me because everyone thought I’d get sick from it since it was from the dollar store…

It seems like you use a lot of different materials throughout your animations. How do you create this style?

I walk around with my iPhone, taking photos throughout the day. When I drop my son off at daycare, when I teach, when I’m walking on the street — I get texture from things like old fire alarm boxes, whatever I see. After capturing these materials, I think about setting a scene with these materials.

I really like to capture food. For example, I like to pitch people as pancakes and bagels — bread in particular is a simple enough shape and the texture is mild enough (as in, it’s not so busy) that it lends itself well to bodies, etc.

We’ve watched the TED-Ed Lesson a few times now, and we have to ask. What are the weirdest things you used in this TED-Ed Lesson — things that we may not even want to know are in there?

Well, there’s a chicken bone somewhere in the animation. And the rocket ship in the beginning of the lesson is a telephone poll that had duct tape on it.

The TED-Ed Team feels lucky to have created the first live-action TED-Ed Lesson with five-time Grammy winner, and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones bassist, Victor Wooten.

The shoot took place on a Saturday, and while the 10-person camera, lighting and sound crew primed the bass-riddled second level of Manhattan’s David Gage’s Repair Shop, a few of us decided to try our hand at documenting the creative process of each artist in the room. These pictures, taken with our cell phones, tell the story behind the “one-shoot” TED-Ed Lesson entitled, Victor Wooten: Music as a language.

8:00am The film crew arrived two hours before Victor to be sure they had ample time unload, setup and solve every problem the beautiful location could possibly pose to their super-sensitive HD camera. The first problem noted was the extreme light pouring in through one side of the room.

You can see the extreme difference in exposure in this picture in which we photographed Lesson Director, Angela Cheng, with our backs to window shown in the previous picture. One side of the room is completely light. The other, completely dark.

8:30am Using massive film lights to brighten the shadowy areas and match the exposure levels of the window was the obvious solution to the team’s first problem of the day. However, the solution wasn’t just as simple as positioning a light. The operating plan was to use a steadycam (pictured above) to walk in circles around Victor as he performed. So, lights located anywhere on the same plane as Victor would also be picked up by the camera, which was unacceptable to the team.

Lucky for us, the room had a small balcony opposite the over-exposed window. This was the perfect perch to position lights that could spotlight Victor, illuminate any unwanted shadows and add a controlled visual texture to the room.

In charge of creating that texture was a most capable cinematographer named, Anthony Jannelli [pictured far right]. If you have seen Silence of the Lambs or Independence Day, then you have seen just a few examples of Anthony’s incredible work in Film.

9:00amWe cleared out a few of the beautiful basses waiting for repair and installed two massive lights on the balcony. The gel material you see over the first light balanced the light’s color to match that of the window on the far side of the room. And the yellow screen you see in the far right of the picture diffused each light making them less harsh on Victor and the instruments around him.

10:00am Just as we finished lighting the scene, Victor showed up. We each took a moment to let him know how much we appreciated his work, and he began stringing up his electric bass guitar.

10:15am Ensuring that we captured great sound was the next major challenge. Victor decided to plug into an amp located just behind him, which allowed the sound engineer, Jon Moore, to mount a microphone off camera between the lights on the balcony.

10:30am Next, steadycam operator, Michael Fuchs, suited up for one practice run. He couldn’t do too many rehearsals because the camera and harness together weighed well over 100 pounds.

11:00am We were ready. Project Facilitator, and TED-Ed team member, Jordan Reeves marked the first scene with the electronic slate….

….and Anthony and Angela yelled “action” as they monitored the footage behind a closed door in the hallway.

After many hours of prep work, the shoot itself was finished after two consecutive and nearly identical five minute takes. Victor performed brilliantly in both.

1:00pm After breaking down and returning our rental equipment, the only tasks left were to ingest the footage into Final Cut Pro, collectively decide on the best take, splice in Victor’s narration, balance the levels and share the Lesson on TED-Ed!

Check out the full TED-Ed Lesson here. If you look very closely, you might see the sound guy hiding behind a bass. Does knowing the story behind the shoot change your perception?

Paul Andersen, creator of the “The Five Fingers of Evolution” and a seasoned AP Biology teacher at Bozeman High School in Montana, talks to TED-Ed about his life as a teacher and how he integrates videos into his teaching.

You have been teaching for the past 18 years — that’s a long time. Do you remember what you thought on your first day?

I will never forget my first day of teaching. I started my career teaching all sciences in a rural Montana school. The average class size was about ten. I can remember the names of the students and where most of them were sitting in the classroom. I also remember being nervous and incredibly excited. As a teacher you have the ability to create your own environment from scratch. This is incredibly freeing but it is also a great responsibility. I still get a little nervous and excited before my first class each morning.

What’s your most memorable (or in your case, most embarrassing) teaching moment?
My most memorable day was probably my first day of student teaching. I needed to use the bathroom before class and so I chose the student bathroom (big mistake) rather than the staff bathroom. I used my foot to raise and lower the toilet seat to avoid touching anything. This worked great until the toilet seat came crashing down and broke in half. Explaining this to the school secretary on my first day of teaching was humbling. Needless to say things have gotten better over the years.

How have you been using video in your classroom?
I started creating videos for my classroom about four years ago. The initial videos were supplementary and designed for just my students. A friend of mine suggested that I start posting them online as well. This is one of the greatest pieces of advice I have ever received. Learners around the world have viewed my science lessons on YouTube millions of times and the feedback I have gotten from these learners has been incredible. The comments have been very appreciated but they have also made me a better teacher. When your audience is the world you take everything a little more seriously.

What do your students think about how video is integrated in their learning?
Students love the independent nature of the class. Students are able to pause, rewind and fast forward the video according to their own pace of learning. I couldn’t use this system without the videos.

What was your first reaction when you saw your TED-Ed Animated Lesson?
I was simply amazed. The animation that Alan Foreman created added a whole new element to the lesson. Watching videos like these is a relatively new and thoroughly engaging experience. Your mind is working to keep up with the parallel story lines: the story of the narrator and the story of the animator. It is very exciting to be a part of such a great project.

Students can sometimes be the toughest critics. What did your students think of your TED-Ed Lesson?
The students loved the video. When I was in school, technology consisted of filmstrips and audiotapes. The lucky students were the ones chosen to change the slide when the tape would beep. Today’s students are immersed in media and they are more discriminating. The students have enjoyed all of the TED-Ed videos that they have seen in class and I anticipate using many of them next year.

What’s your favorite functionality of the TED-Ed Platform so far (if applicable)?
The power of the internet is in connections. I don’t know how many times I have sat down at the computer and found myself an hour later on a fascinating journey of learning. The Dig Deeper feature of the TED-Ed website can be that first step down the learning path.

Watch more of Paul Anderson’s educational videos on his YouTube Channel, Bozeman Biology.

Shakespearean insults, mind-boggling numbers, universal mysteries, and microscopic battles — these topics are just hint of the intellectual expanse covered by the educators and animators in the top ten most viewed Lessons on ed.ted.com. Click any image to view the full Lesson.

#1 Power of Simple Word - Long, fancy words designed to show off your intelligence and vocabulary are all very well, but they aren’t always the best words. In this short, playful vide explains why simple, punchy language is often the clearest way to convey a message.

#2 How Big is Infinity? - Using the fundamentals of set theory, explore the mind-bending concept of the “infinity of infinities” — and how it led mathematicians to conclude that math itself contains unanswerable questions.

#3 Secret Life of Plankton - New videography techniques have opened up the oceans’ microscopic ecosystem, revealing it to be both mesmerizingly beautiful and astoundingly complex.

#4 Questions No One Knows the Answers to - In the first of a TED-Ed series designed to catalyze curiosity, TED Curator Chris Anderson shares his boyhood obsession with quirky questions that seem to have no answers.

#5 Just How Small is An Atom - Just how small are atoms? And what’s inside them? The answers turn out to be astounding, even for those who think they know. This fast-paced animation uses spectacular metaphors (imagine a blueberry the size of a football stadium!) to give a visceral sense of the building blocks that make our world.

#6 Victor Wooten: Music as a Language - Music is a powerful communication tool–it causes us to laugh, cry, think and question. Bassist and five-time Grammy winner, Victor Wooten, asks us to approach music the same way we learn verbal language–by embracing mistakes and playing as often as possible.

#7 Insults by Shakespeare  – “You’re a fishmonger!” By taking a closer look at Shakespeare’s words — specifically his insults — we see why he is known as a master playwright whose works transcend time and appeal to audiences all over the world.

#8 How Simple Ideas Lead to Scientific Discoveries - Adam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed — Eratosthenes’ calculation of the Earth’s circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau’s measurement of the speed of light in 1849.

#9 The Wacky History of Cell Theory Scientific discovery isn’t as simple as one good experiment. The weird and wonderful history of cell theory illuminates the twists and turns that came together to build the foundations of biology.

In celebration of the summer Olympics, TED-Ed got the chance to work with Olympic gold-medalist, Steve Mesler, on a personal TED-Ed Lesson about two decisions that  put him on the path to Olympic glory. The lesson, which was visualized by Augenblick Studios, was designed to complement Steve’s work at Classroom Champions — an inspiring program created by Steve and his fellow Olympians to connect students in high-need schools with top performing athletes. The athletes work with individual classes around the world, in person and via Skype, to support students in recognizing their potential, setting goals and dreaming big.

A huge bonus in spending a day creating a lesson with an Olympian is the opportunity to try on a gold medal!

[Pictured: Jordan, Logan, Steve, & Bedirhan. Steve is the one who looks like he has competed in the Olympics.]