The story behind the Rosetta ‘claymation’

Earlier this month, the Royal Observatory Greenwich, UK, released a wonderful educational video about the Rosetta Mission using ‘claymation’ – animated clay figures. It was a big hit with the Rosetta team and so we caught up with Elizabeth Avery, senior manager of Astronomy Education at the ROG and one of the minds behind the video, to learn more about how it was put together. The same team at the ROG has also since released a complementary video called Space Rocks, about asteroids, comets, meteors, and meteorites. You can watch both videos as part of this post. What made you choose to focus on the Rosetta mission for this video? We have a very long list of things we would love to make videos about, so it is always a huge challenge to choose just one topic. When we were first thinking of ideas for a video project, Rosetta and Philae were in the news a lot, people were excited about such an amazing mission, and many of our visitors had lots of questions about it.  We knew these videos were going to be created for schools (age 9-14), so as with all our other schools videos, we asked our teacher forum what they would like. The Rosetta Mission and Space Rocks were topics that came up again and again, so we were confident they would be good topics to go for. Why did you choose 'claymation' to tell the story? This was actually something we hadn’t tried before.  The designer we were working with at Beakus suggested it and when we saw the first drafts, we knew we were on to a winner! After we had secured the funding, it took around two months to plan the videos, get scripts together, record the voiceovers, work with the designers, choose the music, and […]

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