Marine biologists place sensors on sperm whales to track their vitals (by shooting the sensor into their skin with a gun). This sensor generates a long spreadsheet of numbers that is very difficult to visualize. Students are asked to look at dozens of different numbers that were generated during the hours that the whale dove deep into the sea to forage for giant squid.
The goal of this project was to display changes in the whale’s internals over time, along with all the numbers from their spreadsheet. The whole journey is sped up to take about 6 minutes instead of 6 hours. The teacher speaks over each section of the journey, giving context for the depth, intense pressures, lack of light, etc. as the whale completely exhausts it’s blood oxygen and muscle tissue. And as an added bonus we threw in two violent interactions with giant squid, as this is the reason the whale is diving (to risk death in order to eat).
It was animated in Autodesk Maya, enhanced in Adobe After Effects, with audio editing in Audition and the final assembly in Premiere.