"Zero Waste: Is It Possible?" the TechTeens Ask!

California Academy TechTeens Kate, Victoria and Emma created this video project inspired by the "Habitat Earth" planetarium show. They asked our visitors whether they thought if was possible for humans to get to zero waste. Here's what they found out.

For more about San Francisco's Zero Waste initiative, see http://www.sfenvironment.org/zero-waste .

The TechTeens at the AAAS Family Science Days!

Check out this video documenting what the Cal Academy TechTeens did and experienced at the AAAS Family Science Days in March in San Jose, California.

Great work by the TechTeens Viz team!

Bioblitz Video

Mark and I, along with Robert and Madeleine, participated and documented an Academy-led Bioblitz on March 7th. We spent the day learning how to use iNaturalist and the importance of citizen science. We sorted through the footage to create a video summary of our day and what we did. Our goal was to create a light and fun video that captured the spirit of our day and the things we were able to see! 

Citizen Science: http://www.calacademy.org/citizen-science-0
iNaturalist: http://www.inaturalist.org

Our First Video: "Butterfly Flight through the Academy"

What we have been calling our "animal voice-over" video is finally done! This is our first video project that the Viz Team worked on together as a whole group. Here is the description of what our awesome video is about, steps in how we made it, and what we learned from this project.

What It's About

Our video is intended to give the viewer some basic facts about animals here in the Academy, including:

• origin of a couple of the butterflies in the rainforest exhibit
• the habitat of the giant sea bass
• some cool scientific facts about rays
• and some background about our mascot Claude, the albino alligator

Basic Plot: A nervous / curious butterfly escapes the rainforest exhibit to visit the giant sea bass in the aquarium, the rays in the tank by the planetarium, and Claude the albino alligator in the swamp while learning about the unique facts of each animal.

How We Made It

These are the ten steps we took to create this project:

1. brainstormed ideas on what the video will be about (settling on the idea of animal voice-overs)
2. chose what animals to do voice-overs of
3. split up into teams to research each animal and write a script
4. filmed footage of each animal
5. edited the footage using Adobe Premiere in our teams
6. put the separate clips together into one video
7. presented the first draft (very rough cut)
8. received feedback on the rough cut
9. changed some elements based on the feedback
10. TA-DAAAA!!! :D

What We Learned

Here are a couple of the many things we learned from making our voice-over video, and how we can improve for our upcoming projects:

• background information of some of the animals at the Academy
• how to use Adobe Premiere to edit video and other assets
• the creative design process (filming, adding music/voice overs, editing sequences, etc.)
• the amount of video we need before editing (a lot)
• the specific methods of filming (panning, tilting, zoom, rule of thirds)
• how to improve after getting feedback

• the importance of time management
• how to work in teams
• asset gathering
• Creative Commons (copyright policies)

We had a lot of fun in making this video together- I hope you enjoy it too! :)

And now, without further ado, "Butterfly Flight through the Academy."

Blog post prepared by Emma.

Mark's Ruble Coin

This coin is a 50 ruble coin and was made in 1992. This coin is significant to me because I am ethnically Russian. The gigapixel image reveals the wear and tear of 23 years. There are gaps between the inner part and outer part of the coin.

Noah's Darth Vader Minifig

This is a photo of a Darth Vader Lego Minifigure, taken in extremely high resolution using the Giga Macro microscope at the California Academy of Sciences. To upload it, I scaled down the size of the image to 600x626, but the original image was 9275x9680 (over 700 MB).

This minifigure is one of my brother's Lego toys that he likes to play with. I scanned it to bring home and show him how awesome his Lego Minifigures looked under a super high-powered microscope. We like to play with these Legos together, so I scanned this to represent our love of playing Legos.

This picture is a zoomed in image of the buttons on Darth Vader's armor, shown in the first image above in the center of the screen. I zoomed in on this to show that although the buttons look like a solid color when viewed normally, they are actually speckled with white parts when zoomed in.

Madeleine's Beloved Paintbrush

Paintbrush Tip

The paintbrush in this picture is a small width flat out that I carry around religiously in my backpack. 6/32" (0.1875") wide, this brush is used for filling small places and is often used with similarly sized detail brushes. The texture is extremely soft and silkily, working best with smoother paints such as oils or watercolors. This very tips of the brush fan out a bit from long use as also apparent with the plier marks from tightening the fiber holding ferrule. The wear and tear from it being loose in the backpack is apparent in every aspect of this picture.

However, this doesn't  show the extent of the bristle condition. Once we zoomed in the image even farther than this than the above a lot more became apparent to me.

 Many small pieces of dust had attached themselves to individual fibers. As with all brushes, residual paint colored the base. Looking at the line going straight down you can find traces of black paint stain from oil paint, burnt sienna acrylic (a slightly unsaturated yellow orange), and tiny bits of gray. In addition to that, there is a small splotch of linseed oil near the middle bottom of the image that appears red tinged on the orange fibers. Looking at individual bristles you can also see how each and everyone of them are  not completely solid but actually have a semi translucent appearance showing the edges more than anything else.

It was amazing to see the detail of an instrument that has so much daily use in my life.

Thank you!