I developed a computer animation for the Museum of History of Science in Oxford, the exhibition was called: Back from the Dead.
A layer of the model of Penicillin by Dorothy Hodgkin. The circles represent the electron density.
The animation project shows how Dorothy Hodgkin’s original model of the structure of penicillin was created (“Model of the three dimensional structure of penicillin created by Dorothy Hodgkin, Oxford, c. 1945; MHS inv. 17631”). This required developing an understanding of X-ray crystallography and its historical practice and an ability to visualise both the steps in the process and an effective way to communicate these without overwhelming the viewer.
Hodgkin’s model is drawn on plexiglass plates and represents a three-dimensional contour map of part of the crystal salt of penicillin. The contours are lines of electron density and show the positions of individual atoms in the structure. This artifact from Hodgkin’s research is a fairly meaningful example of three-dimensional scientific modeling that was used to represent an invisible structure before the age of computers.
used Software: Autodesk Maya, Adobe After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop