Astrobiology animated editorial illustrations

This is a series of animated editorial illustrations around the theme of astrobiology (the search for life on other planets).

  • The first image was inspired by iconic scenes from the film Contact and the book The Three-Body Problem, as a scientist listens to signals from a radio telescope that is scanning exoplanets.

  • The second image is of scientists looking under Martian rocks for traces of microbial life.

  • The third image is of an extremophile, one of a large category of organisms that live here on Earth in extreme environments generally hostile to life—places that might also be found on other worlds.

I was inspired by Aquila magazine, a science magazine for curious kids. Each issue of Aquila is built around a particular topic, and every article explores different facets of that topic. They bring the topic to life with illustrations, puzzles and activities. So, inspired by their visual storytelling and their playfulness, I decided to generate my own editorial topic—astrobiology—and use that to create this personal project. I imagined a series of GIFs that could be used on social platforms to promote a magazine issue on the topic of astrobiology. Every week during that issue’s publication month, we’d roll out a new GIF, and use that to talk about the article it pertains to.

I created the style frames in Affinity Photo, then rebuild those entirely in Moho with some tweaks and additions, so I could rig and animate them, add “boil” and give them a more hand-made look.

Previous
Previous

"Normal Donuts" 15-sec ad

Next
Next

"Veruna" 30-sec explainer animation