Monday, February 20, 2012

Go North

by Emanuele Biestro

Sometimes it happens even to the best communicators to stumble across complicated notions to be explained to the mainstream. This is not surely the situation of the Kairòs Studio, a group of people who aim to talk in a simple, funny and pro way mankind's challenges towards a sustainable future. Indeed, they have been called to create a cartoon movie explaining how the CO2 capture and storage technology works, a project carried on by some researchers at the University Centre in Longyearbyen, on the isle of Svalbard (Norway).

«When they contacted us to create a flash animation featuring the Longyearbyen CO2 lab's carbon capture project we jumped at the idea, but we were also conscious of the difficulties and hard work involved: to explain a complex scientific/technical project to groups of school children would be challenging» say on the project website Daniele Di Domenico and Simone Cau, who take care respectively of the video and multimedia section and of the animation within the Kairòs Studio.

Concerning this, the employees of the Kairòs Studio had the perfect intuition about creating a story featuring a little molecule of carbon dioxide named Dioxy, set first in a coal mine, then through the mineral mining and the combustion until the CO2 storage cave, where the setting is composed by an arena in which all the other CO2 molecules are entertained by a show lasting 12 thousand years: this is how long it takes for the CO2 to be stored!

«Working for a public composed almost entirely by 10 year old children really helped us because it is necessary to simplify a lot of things in order to communicate to children and let the fantasy go», says Daniele, who stressed also the work on the soundtrack «entirely original and of our own, with pieces and songs, very catchy, to impress the audience». The result is a 23 minute lasting video, divided into 8 episodes, published two by two each Monday, starting from February, the 6th.

«From the very beginning we conceived the video as a double-faced tool, very flexible. Indeed, it could be seen as a movie during conferences, shows and similar "live" events, otherwise it could be web broadcast through the episodes» says Daniele. The episodes will be available on the Kairòs studio YouTube channel and on the Facebook page.

The belief is to have done a great job for the children, hoping this would be the same for the adults asking to learn more.

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