Professor Stephen Hawking

Supertranslations

The Scrapbook

About our partners

Genius, is often over-used, but in the case of Professor Stephen Hawking it is totally appropriate. Hawking was a physicist and international bestselling author who helped transform our understanding of the universe. We worked with Professor Hawking on two occasions to help him bring his theories to life.

The challenge

Our task was to make the strange and unfathomable world of black holes, more accessible to the general public. We took very complex and abstract ideas, and simplified them in a way people outside the scientific community could understand. We dug deep into our own imagination, used metaphors at every turn to help give meaning to what must be one of our most challenging explainer videos.

The film

We worked with the Hawking Foundation to help explain Hawking, Strominger and Perry’s theory about supertranslations, in support of Professor Hawking’s final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions. Hawking explains a brief history of gravity and black holes before going onto explain the idea of supertranslations.

An information dense and challenging narrative, our whiteboard animation honoured and reflected the scientific explanations while bringing in other elements such as characters from popular fiction and black hole barbers to deliver this complicated information in a more accessible way. We did this giving the film a steady pace and using animation to give viewers a clear focus. We used recognisable characters such as Darth Vader and Alice from the Lewis Carroll classic to make the film more relatable and to bring black holes closer to the familiar.

The context

For more information on Brief Answers to the Big Questions, visit the publisher's website here and read a blog written by Andrew Park on the creation of the film here.