CERN

CERN the European laboratory for particle physics and home to the Large Hadron Collider, is celebrating #CERN70 years of scientific discovery and innovation!

As part of the festivities we were asked to produce eight short animations to enhance CERN’s 70th anniversary exhibition at Geneva Airport, accompanying a giant 20m timeline in front of the check-in. The idea being that budding boffins could scan a section of the timeline on their mobile that would then transport them to one of our videos, breaking down the given section of the timeline via a weblink. 

This is actually Grizzle’s second time dabbling in the mysteries of the Universe having worked with the Cern crew last year for a series of videos screening in their new exhibition space. The original videos centred around compositing a selection of multicultural profs into 4 videos, each offering different explanations into how the Universe works in one of five languages. 

This time round we delved much deeper, into the fabric of everything, from how matter came into being at the big bang, all the way out to cosmic events as stars go supernova. Each video presented its own complexities as we figured out how to convert diagrams into full fledged 3D animations depicting the chaos that is the world on a sub-microscopic, fortunately made easier with a few science lessons from the people with the biggest machine in the world.

Big science needs big machines, but fortunately the nice folks at Cern have that covered, which is not to say the simulations involved didn’t still require a fair amount of computational power and some hefty render times. 

We utilised a cocktail of different software packages to bring these videos together, as standard we started with X-Particles in C4D but also branched out Blender’s own particle systems that allowed for versatile sliders to tweak the erratic movements of particles as they either collide or merge to create different types of matter. And of course After Effects to pull together varying layers when looking at Quarks, Gluons, electrons, Plasma, Antimatter, you name it.

So keep an eye out if you’re visiting Geneva Airport or the Cern exhibition!