Jan 2023 Visualization of Earth's orbit in 2023 with elements to show each day, week, and special events like Solstices, Equinoxes, Aphelion and Perihelion! Made with VerseView

Nov 2021 Visual explanation of the Relativity of Simultaneity, as discovered by a sneezy little cloud that gets onto the NYC subway! 😁 Made with Unreal Engine and After Effects

Feb 2021 Simulation of Starlink mega-satellite-constellation streaks against the Night Sky. Seen by a simulated camera taking 30sec exposures from Vera Rubin Observatory at various times of the year. Satellites are at exactly their planned altitudes and orbital 'shells', moving at the correct orbital velocity, passing into Earth's shadow accurately, being slightly sunset-colored as they pass into darkness. The apparent magnitudes of stars and satellites are true to empirical observations and the exposure of the camera has been calibrated to match typical sensors. This is what Night Sky photography will be if Starlink continues... Made with VerseView

Nov 2020 Scale-accurate visual of the different sized asteroids that have or could hit Earth, compared to NYC! Made in collaboration with Veritasium using Google Earth Studio, Unreal Engine, After Effects and DaVinci Fusion

Jan 2020 Demonstrating the connection between the Mandelbrot set and Logistic map through a 3D volume data rendering. Made in Python using Vispy, code is open source

Apr 2023 Quick accurate visual showing the path Saturn has taken relative to Earth between late 2022 and early 2023, it's passage behind the sun from our perspective, and back into clear viewing! Made for Dr Becky's Night Sky News using VerseView and JPL's Horizon ephemerides

Mar 2023 Visual comparison of Asteroid 2023 DW versus the closest commonly known size analogy - the Arc de Triomphe! There were no artist illustrations of this asteroid, so during the editing process I figured I'd make a quick visual to help guide viewer's imaginations! Made in Unreal Engine

Mar 2023 Visual explanation of the core aspects of the Vesuvius Challenge, a $1,000,000 prize to the first team to develop algorithms to parse the text of ancient Roman scrolls which were pulverized in the Mount Vesuvius eruption! This tutorial animation was made to clarifying the core challenge to people, a process of training a neural network/computer vision code to see the ancient ink within lava-obfuscated 3D volumetric scroll scans! Worked with an incredible team to get this done in a rapid turn around. Made with VerseView

Jan 2023 Visualization of Earth's orbit in 2023 with elements to show each day, week, and special events like Solstices, Equinoxes, Aphelion and Perihelion! Made with VerseView

Jul 2022 Visualization of the Jezero crater region of Mars, where Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter continue to explore and do science! Made with VerseView and Unreal Engine

Jul 2022 Digital recreation of the Tranquility base landing site of Apollo 11, built with the highest resolution digital elevation model available, 3D scanned Apollo moon-rocks detailing the surface, high quality 3D models of the LM and science instruments that were left on the surface, and a texture of the likely condition of the flag. Made with VerseView and Unreal Engine

Jul 2022 Perspectives on the Moon, as seen from imagining my car in low orbit, and stories around the (VFX) campfire. Made with VerseView and Unreal Engine

Jan 2022 Calendar for the year 2022 created using accurate Ephemeris and rotational elements of the Moon and Earth, and Planets! Each slice of the year represents 1 day. Made with VerseView

Dec 2021 Supernova core collapse animation, showing the various density nuclei throughout Sumi's (the star's) core, with Iron nuclei (each particle shown with correct counts of protons/neutrons) in the core eventually collapsing into neutrons & neutrinos... Made with Unreal Engine, After Effects, and Procreate

Nov 2021 Visual exploration of what it means to see to the Beginning of the Universe, ie. to the Cosmic Microwave Background. Shrinking the Universe to extremely small scale (Manhattan) gives clarity to fundamental separation of causality between observers. Made with After Effects

Nov 2021 Visual explanation of the Relativity of Simultaneity, as discovered by a sneezy little cloud that gets onto the NYC subway! 😁 Made with Unreal Engine and After Effects

Jul 2021 Visualization of the Collatz conjecture (3x+1) directed graph being built, including its transformation from an xy-graph into the directed graph, and then into a coral-like graph. With so many complex rules of interconnection, it would have been a nightmare in After Effects, so it was built in Python using manim and the superb networkx package. Result was a system which can fully animate basically any directed graph!

Jul 2021 Visual explanation of Benford's Law, which arises from the 3x+1 equation. Made with Python for data generation and a truly OP After Effects comp with very scary JS expressions

Jul 2021 Visual explanation of 3x+1 seen as a "hailstone", perhaps rising very high but always returning to Earth! Made with After Effects and Python for data generation

Jun 2021 Manually tracked rotations of the wheel and generated data based on it, visualizing on-screen to help prove that the craft in fact traveled at high speed! Made in After Effects

May 2021 Visual explanation of Turing Machines, and especially the h/h+ 'decidability' machine which takes its own instructions as input to itself! Emphasis on making an explanation which retained the aesthetic of a "machine" rather than some strenous analogy, which is what most explanations of this concept resort to! Made in After Effects

May 2021 Visual explanation of Cantor's Diagonalization proof, with an emphasis on an intuitive visual explanation. Made in After Effects

May 2021 Conway's Game of Life ... running within Conway's Game of Life, a truly mind-boggling reality which was very hard to render a smooth deep zoom of. Made with a custom numpy-numba-opencv renderer built from scratch in Python to render such a gigantic canvas (direct render would be ~50,000px wide and tall), beyond what After Effects/Fusion/OpenGL, can handle

May 2021 Visualizations of Conway's Game of Life, including an animation demonstrating the rules of the zero-player-game! Made with the golly app + python scripts, composited in DaVinci Resolve/Fusion

Mar 2021 Animation of the unexpected resonance of London's Millenium Bridge! Made with After Effects

Mar 2021 Visualization of the 3:2 resonance of Jupiter's Moon Europa/Io/Ganymede! Made with After Effects

Mar 2021 Visual explanation of the Kuramoto syncronization equation, made with Python simulations, manim, and After Effects

Mar 2021 Visual explanation of the way strong tidal force elongates a nearby moon in its parent gravitational field. Made with After Effects

Feb 2021 Visualization of all satellite orbits around Earth as of early 2021, with proposed Starlink phases shown in addition. Made with VerseView

Feb 2021 Simulation of Starlink mega-satellite-constellation streaks against the Night Sky. Seen by a simulated camera taking 30sec exposures from Vera Rubin Observatory at various times of the year. Satellites are at exactly their planned altitudes and orbital 'shells', moving at the correct orbital velocity, passing into Earth's shadow accurately, being slightly sunset-colored as they pass into darkness. The apparent magnitudes of stars and satellites are true to empirical observations and the exposure of the camera has been calibrated to match typical sensors. This is what Night Sky photography will be if Starlink continues... Made with VerseView

Nov 2020 Scale-accurate visual of the different sized asteroids that have or could hit Earth, compared to NYC! Made in collaboration with Veritasium using Google Earth Studio, Unreal Engine, After Effects and DaVinci Fusion

Nov 2020 Visualization of the path of Asteroid Duende by Earth, driven by JPL Ephemeris data and IAU rotational elements of the Earth! Made in VerseView

Oct 2020 Fun visual explainer showing how the one-way speed of light can't be measured! Made in collaboration with Veritasium using After Effects & Resolve

Oct 2020 Gravitational lensing visualization, made by simulating photon trajectories following spacetime curvature (gravity). Rendered as millions of extremely thin and transparent lines with varying opacity along paths. When combined, you get a 'map' of photon trajectories and caustics! This idea was not mine, it was lifted and modified from Jamie Portsmouth's gravy code, who helped me get high quality rendering going for this video. Thanks Jamie! Made with WebGL, GLSL, and After Effects for compositing and animation.

Oct 2020 Similar to above, visualizes graviational lensing but with the addition of time dilation, demonstrating how photons from the same source arrive at different times to our telescopes on Earth! Made with WebGL, GLSL, and After Effects for compositing and animation.

Oct 2020 Connecting the standard HR-diagram to the Massive Star Life Cycle chart! Made in After Effects

Oct 2020 Fun visual effects sequence launching Derek into space for some gravity explorations! Made with lots of green screen, Space Engine for the star field, MSFS for the ground-atmosphere, real slomo footage from BPS Space for the rocket, and After Effects for all the compositing magic!

Oct 2020 Visuals demonstrating the effect of differing reference frames on the perception of gravity, demonstrating the illusion of gravitational force as we experience it. Made in After Effects with Space Engine for backgrounds

Oct 2020 Somewhat mindbending visual showing how a spacecraft orbit can be considered a helix in 4D spacetime, rather than a simply elliptical path in 3D space! Made in After Effects

Sep 2020 Visual exploration of the incredible fact that the infinite Penrose tiling does not repeat! Made in After Effects with some Python to make arbitrarily large tilings

Sep 2020 Visual explanation of Johannes Kepler's 'Mysterium Cosmigraphicum' theory that the orbits of the Planets were equivalent to the Platonic solids within one another. Made in a hand-drawn style echoing the actual Mysterium Cosmigraphicum document, by layering Unreal Engine renders and paper textures in After Effects with some clever compositing

Oct 2020 Narrative visual exploration of the diversity in human sleep cycles, and specifically how they've been impacted by artificial light at night. Made in After Effects

Sep 2020 Accurate visualization of atomic weapons tests in the USA during the 50s and 60s, where each mushroom cloud is timed precisely to the dates a nuclear test actually occurred, and the rads/capita map is taken from a published paper on the topic. Made in After Effects, Python for data wrangling

Jul 2020 One of the more mind-bending explainers, showing how the Cosmic Distance Ladder concept works in astronomy. Made in collaboration with Veritasium using the most absolutely insane After Effects composition wherein hundreds of tracks were interlinked using JS expressions, to make the animation show all the relevant phenomena!

Jul 2020 Visual explanation of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, and the ratio of Hydrogen, Helium, and Deuterium that was formed in the first few minutes of the Universe. Made in collaboration with Veritasium using a dizzyingly complex After Effects composition. Learned a lot about accessibility when making this one, as the comments section chimed in with people who couldn't watch it due to the flashing lights 😟

Jun 2020 Visual explanation of the Reynold's number metric of turbulent/laminar flow. Made in collaboration with Ivy Tello and Veritasium using After Effects

Mar 2020 Simultaneous simulation-and-visualization of the Schrödinger wave function, with the grid lines in x showing the real component, y showing imaginary component, and height and color of the 3D surface showing the collapse probability distribution. Made in Python using PyQtGraph

Jan 2020 Deep zoom of the logistic map fractal by generating a 2.5-million-point scatterplot. Made in Python using Vispy, code is open source

Jan 2020 Demonstrating the connection between the Mandelbrot set and Logistic map through a 3D volume data rendering. Made in Python using Vispy, code is open source

Dec 2019 Depicts the discovery of Chaos theory by early punch-card computer built for weather simulations. Data is exact, based on real differential equation solutions calculated in Python, animated in After Effects

Dec 2019 Visualization of 3-body-problem through stable orbits and unstable orbits. Simulated in Python, animated in After Effects

Dec 2019 Simulation visualization of the "Butterfly" strange attractor differential equation and its sensitivity to initial perturbations. Each line is a tiny variation on starting conditions! Made with Python and PyQtGraph

Aug 2019 Accurate visual demonstrating the incredibly low pressures the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity would need to operate in — higher than any aircraft ever! Had some fun re-painting the 747 to say “Veritasium Air” 😁 Made in After Effects

Aug 2019 Data driven, beautiful plots of electric vehicle technology development markers. Made in After Effects with Python for data wrangling

Jul 2019 Impact hydrodynamic simulations stylized to visualize impact cratering on the moon, including the inverted stratigraphy which characterizes those impacts! Made in After Effects

Jul 2019 Map of Viking homelands and attacks from public data, combined with year-round Vitamin D map, demonstrating how the Vikings needed Cod to survive. Made in After Effects with map layers made in Python

May 2019 Visual of the Late Heavy Bombardment, with asteroids randomly spawned with a particle effect & decal applied on impact. There was also a scaling going on so that the larger asteroids made larger explosions and impacts! Made in Unreal Engine

May 2019 Particle trails visualize the evolution of the Moon's orbit for millions of years after its giant impact formation. Made in Unreal Engine with simulation data from Matija Ćuk et al. (2016), "Tidal evolution of the Moon from a high-obliquity, high-angular-momentum"

Dec 2018 Particles simulation visualizing real tidal and gravitational force equations and the positions of the Earth and Moon. This was the first ever animation made in VerseView!