Look mum, it's moving!

I don’t have art talent. When my daughter was very small we once had this conversation:

me: you will find your talent, you do have it you just don’t know yet.
tiny person: what is your talent mummy?
me: I don’t think I have any…I am still trying to find it!
tiny person: your talent is.. looking after me! You are doing it very well mummy.

(I do miss the time when she always finished her sentence with “mummy”).

I wish I had art talent. I enjoy art projects but I could never just create something from nothing that looks pretty. I guess that’s why doing computer science suits me more. Computer programs could be described as art projects, the process of producing a working piece of software involves not only putting instructions together, but how they are put together does matter too.

My undergraduate final year project on the computer science side was to implement a “Key Frame Animation Tool”. It was written in C, using OpenGL and XForms libraries (you get the idea from the feature picture at the top). Fast forward to today, animation software tools are much much more sophisticated. So I felt pretty excited when I went to an RDP (Research Development Programme) workshop on “Animate your research” last week to learn about how to create animation based on our research.

Three key things I learnt from the workshop: (1) An animation can still be very impactful even if the drawings are considered bad to the untrained eyes; (2) when the term “cryptography” does not mean anything to the people I was talking to, using it to explain my research so that they can visualise it simply doesn’t work; (3) The people at the workshop prefer to hear about the positive impact by doing something, rather than the negative impact if we don’t do something.

I felt rather intimidated when I was given some blank paper and a pencil and asked to draw three key themes of my research. I didn’t like anything I put on those papers. Towards the end of the workshop though, I felt very motivated to try and see if I could create an animation! So I did a silly animation with sound effects added:

Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time during the workshop to complete the drawings for the animation based on zero-knowledge proofs for data exchange in a coffee supply chain. So I wrote down the idea briefly, hopefully, one day I can create it!

Scene showing a series of coffee shops, a person goes into one with a recognisable label (or QR code?)
The person comes out from the coffee shop with a coffee cup in their hand, smiling
Zoom in the hand and then the coffee cup, and then the coffee
“Go back in time” to show how the coffee was made
Coffee -> coffee beans added to machine -> coffee beans in bags delivered to the shop -> coffee beans selected based on verified certificates -> coffee beans bagged in a factory, with certification process going on -> coffee beans delivered to the factory by different distributors -> Coffee beans distributors obtain certification -> farmers sell coffee beans to distributors with certificates showing that they didn’t use deforested lands and that the beans were grown legally.

Obviously, this sequence is overly simplified. However, during the workshop I found that as soon as I went into any details, people didn’t seem to be interested. I can see that this animation can be a nice way to open a technical presentation. Now I just need to start creating some bad drawings…