To celebrate our Collider exhibition, we worked with the BAFTA award-winning Brothers McLeod to bring particle physics to life in this short animation. Myles and Greg McLeod had a pretty tough brief to squeeze all of particle physics (the entire Standard Model) into a two minute animation, but we think they pulled it off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkBcycE25Dw
Collider content developer Rupert Cole interviewed scriptwriter Myles McLeod to find out how they did it.
Is this your first animation to do with physics?
I think it is! Though we’ve done maths before. We won a BAFTA for our psychedelic preschool maths show ‘Quiff and Boot’. Yes, that’s right, psychedelic maths. We also once explained Calculus using zombies. We’ve also done a bit of biology – dinosaurs to be precise – which was fun. We had to summarise 165 million years in 3 minutes. That’s efficiency for you.
Was it a challenge to cram so much particle physics into a two-minute animation?
Well, the challenge is where the fun lies. We were lucky that Harry Cliff at the Science Museum provided us with a wonderful visual explanation. Since we understood it, and we’re definitely not physicists, we knew that others would too. It was a great starting place from where we could then construct the backbone of the narrative. The next thing was what kind of a story did we want to tell, and what kind of characters would be in it.
How did you find physics compared with other topics you have worked with?
I think physics is one of those subjects that does both frighten and fascinate people. Everyone seems to have a drop off point, a point where you go ‘yes I understand that, yes I understand that’ and then ‘no I have no idea what you just said’. It’s such a fundamental science and some of it seems so deep and complex that on the face of it almost seems like magic, especially when you start talking about time moving at different rates and space being curved. On the other hand, it’s all about stars and forces and time and looking to beyond and imagining what’s out there and how it all works, so it’s a beautiful science too.
Where did the names Max and Tangle come from?
Well we wanted to take some characters from the world of physics so the cat is supposed to be Schrödinger’s Cat. Schrödinger coined the term entanglement, and Tangle sounded like a good name for a cat. We just needed a second character and Maxwell’s Demon was mentioned to us, and hey presto we had Max.
How did you decide on what the personalities of Max and Tangle would be like?
A lot of it came out of the question, ‘why would someone explain in a conversation all this information about particle physics?’ It seemed logical that one was clued up and clever and the other not as smart. Then it seemed like this could be a game of one-upmanship. So the less smart one needed their own advantage to balance things out, for Max that had to be his slyness and gung-ho approach to experiments. Once you start writing the script and getting them talking to each other they really start to show their personalities to you. When the voices come and later the animation, then they become even more distinct.
Do you have a favourite between Max and Tangle?
Max is great because he’s up to no good and it’s fun to have a character like that. They create chaos. But if you were asking me who I’d rather have over to lunch, I think I’d go with Tangle to avoid Max’s life-threatening experiments.
Discover more about protons, quarks and particle physics in our Collider exhibition.