By Floris Baas, Zoë Bor, Jonathan Meijers, Norika Narimatsu, and Anna Zuidgeest
For a project within our Master’s specialization Science Communication & Society, Sofia Gomes asked us to make a video about the importance of microbes for healthy trees. We decided to make a stop-motion video, as this is entertaining while still being informative. Also, we thought this would be easier than learning digital animation :)
With our video, we primarily hope to reach people between 25-39 years old who are starting to settle in their city and would be willing to take actions to make their environments a nice place to live in. However, the video is ideally accessible to everyone so we did not expect people to have prior knowledge about the importance of microbes for healthy trees.
Before we started filming, we did some research into this target audience using a survey. We found that among the participants who have a garden, some plant trees/flowers (34.9%) and others leave fallen leaves undisturbed (33.9%) or use compost (20.6%). However, among the participants who do not have a garden, 60% do want to support tree health as well, but they are not sure how. Thus, for these people our video could help them by showing how they could support the health of the trees in their city.
Here are some of the answers to questions about people's opinions and knowledge of trees and microbes:
Using this, we wrote the script for our stop-motion video and started creating the props and making the frames of the video. We only had three weeks for this project and it was a lot of work to film it all, but it was really fun to do! Here are some behind the scenes pictures of how we made the stop-motion video:
In the stop-motion video, we focussed on four subjects: the importance of trees for cities, the importance of healthy soil for trees, how microbes increase the quality of soil, and what
people can do to increase the health of the soil and the trees in their city.
To communicate these topics we tell a story about two trees. One of these trees dies because his soil was not properly cared for. In contrast, the other one was healthy and survived the winter storm. Using this starting point, we went into the soil to explain the role of the soil microbiome for healthy trees. We used real leaves and dirt in the animation process, which led to some fun antics during the filming process (the soil outside the Sylvius building is actually quite alive!). We found many little critters and worms in the soil, and they tried to escape while filming. If you find a pillbug roaming the halls of the Sylvius that may have been us - Oops!
If you are interested, you can watch our video by clicking on the link below! All in all, it was a really fun project and we closed it off by doing a presentation for our colleagues. Of course, the trees made a comeback in the final presentation as they were the main characters of our project! We really want to thank Sofia for this nice project and her help and enthusiasm throughout!
Link to the stop-motion video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpipin3nxz8.
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