´óÏó´«Ã½

‘Who Knew?’ is an experiment to find how easy (or hard!) science is to understand. And so we asked an Evolutionary Biologist, Yan Wong, to explain the answers to some of life’s burning questions to four very different people – our ‘science interpreters’. These included a comedian, a party animal under the influence of alcohol, a rapper and a five-year-old. We filmed them on different days on an infinity screen which not only gave us a nice clean look, but allowed us to cut between all four explanations more easily. We then took our science interpreters to a new location and asked them to explain the answers back to us.

The Comedian

Iain Stirling probably had the toughest gig. His ‘comedy club’ was actually a set so he didn’t have an audience. As stand-up relies a lot on improvisation and audience reaction, we were particularly pleased and impressed with Iain’s performance delivered to a po-faced camera crew who weren’t allowed to laugh (although some of them did and got scowled at by the director).

The Party Animal

Jay Gardener must have had the best fun filming this. He got to sit around having a few drinks while we ran around after him. Because consuming alcohol can be dangerous we brought along a paramedic to keep his eye on Jay. Jay delivered some brilliant and very funny explanations, but they were very long. It was tough in the edit working out what to keep and what to lose.

The Rapper

Paigey Cakey’s raps really surprised us; it couldn’t have been easy to write them so quickly and to include as many facts as she did. However, she didn’t have time to memorise them all, we needed to shoot them in a few takes. Of course, that didn’t matter to us as we filmed her with different frame sizes and our editor cut them together.

The Child

Ewan (our five-year old) was very funny and frequently wandered off topic to talk about dinosaurs or sharks. But when he stayed on point he actually remembered and understood the science incredibly well. It helped that his mother was there to play tag with him and give him treats every time we stopped filming.

We feel overall that the experiment worked and hopefully anyone watching these clips will discover that science can be fun and easy to understand.