The method
How an episode gets made.
Short films tracing genes from molecular change to disease, discovery, and medicine.
- 01
Write the script
Each episode follows the same skeleton: open on the most surprising fact, then work through the name, the discovery, the mechanism, the stakes, and what's still unanswered. Every factual claim gets a tag like [F1] so it can be checked later. The story sets the length — nothing is padded to hit a fixed runtime.
- 02
Check every claim
Each tagged claim is matched to a primary or authoritative source, and the points people commonly get wrong are written out carefully. A subject-matter reviewer signs off on the whole set before anything is recorded — narration is expensive to fix after the fact, so the check happens first.
- 03
Build the visuals
Two house styles: a loose ink-and-wash look for people and story, a vintage scientific-plate look for molecules and artifacts. Art is reused from a shared library so the look stays consistent, and no two episodes are laid out the same way.
- 04
Record and render
The voiceover is recorded first; its timing drives the rest. The video is built as code — React rendered frame by frame — then exported to an MP4. A last pass checks every caption stays readable over whatever's behind it.
Why it matters
Most explainers ask you to take the narrator's word for it. Here, every [F#] on screen is a footnote you can open — and every source for an episode is listed in full on its page.