When illustrator/storyteller Oliver Jeffers and animator/woodworker Mac Premo get together, sketchbooks travel 60,000 miles, suitcases wander the streets of Brooklyn and sandwiches are skewered with bows and arrows.

Jeffers and Premo created the opening video for TED2013 — and its star,  the TED Machine. The TED Machine works like a schedule board in an old train station — with panels that reveal, with each new flip, the names of the 72 speakers and performers at TED2013 in squiggly handwriting. In the video above, the machine comes to life in stop-motion animation, revealing a magical world filled with ukelele strumming and changing backdrops. At TED2013, the video — which has a homespun charm a bit different from TED’s regular polished punch — elicited the kind of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ normally reserved for fireworks displays.

On Monday, New York creative types crowded the workshop space of Manhattan’s 14th Street Apple Store for an evening with Jeffers, Premo, and TED’s  Design Director Mike Femia, for a conversation about building the machine and where to find the best trash in the city. During the event, Jeffers and Premo revealed how they met (at summer camp); what they do when they’re not making art (they make hot dogs text); and how they pitched their idea for the TED machine.

Being asked to create the TED2013 opening sequence was nerve-wracking, Premo told the crowd, but he and Jeffers knew it would be a great opportunity to stretch their creative muscles. “TED is the most intellectually-stimulating blitzkrieg in the world,” he said. “And we had to make a film that encapsulates it.”

So they set out to build the TED Machine by doing what they do best: Premo taking on the woodwork and Jeffers creating a collage — something they had to physically attach to the 72 rotating “name bumpers” on the machine, because as Premo said, “We needed the things to turn.”

In the end, filming took five days (note: this is a 72-second long video!) and even included a trip to Coney Island in 7 degree weather.

Femia explained what drew the design team at TED to Premo and Jeffers in the first place — they were impressed by the hand-painted wooden map that the two had created for TED Prize winner JR to track his Inside Out project. The piece eventually became a landmark of the design for the 14-city TED Worldwide Talent Search.

“The moment before talks start at a TED conference is very dramatic,” Femia explained. “People are settling into their chairs; the lights are getting dim. We asked ourselves, ‘How could we make it special?’”

Femia said he knew Premo and Jeffers were right for the job because of their ability to tell a story with their art. “What I like about their work,” Femia said, “is that it’s explanatory — it celebrates the process, the messiness, the dirtiness.”

For an adorable look at more stats from TED-Ed’s first year, head to the TED-Ed blog. Below, we celebrate TED-Ed’s first birthday with our 10 favorite characters from TED-Ed lessons so far.

	How is chemistry like dating? Educator Aaron Sams explains in the lesson “How to speed up chemical reactions (and get a date).” Meet Harriet, the red-headed scientist who, in high school, had a run-in with a crush in the hallway that led to a prom date. The process was strangely similar to the way particles move.
	In the incredible lesson “Inside a cartoonist’s world,” from The New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly, this character shows the process of how cartoonists work. They are the playwright, director, stage designer, choreographer, and costume designer of these miniature, drawn plays.
	Mmmm, pizza.  It’s delicious — but also messy to eat. In the lesson “Pizza physics (New York-style)” this animated slice talks you through how to eat pizza neatly, while teaching you the mathematical and physics principals involved in the act.
	This green guy represents big unknown numbers — like the number of piano tuners in the city of Chicago and the number of M&Ms in a gigantic bin. In this lesson from educator Michael Mitchell, “A clever way to estimate enormous numbers,” learn a very cool way to estimate using the power of ten.
	Affectionately dubbed “yarn lady,” this character appears in the lesson “How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones?” Why the name? Because her organs and body are literally made of yarn – some crocheted, some knitted, some simply balled. Find out why the animators chose yarn (and seeds and candy) to bring this lesson to life in this how-to blog post.
	John Lloyd gave a classic TED Talk back in 2009 about the many things in the universe that are invisible. The talk got a magical, animated TED-Ed redux this year, in the lesson “What’s invisible? More than you think.” In it, Lloyd becomes a very knowledgeable park ranger walking you through the wonder of the world.
	These adorable line drawings are an animated renderings of educator Aaron Reedy and his wife, who was pregnant at the time. In the lesson “Sex determination. More complicated than you thought,” Reedy outlines the surprising factors that helped determine whether he’d have a daughter or a son.
	All heroes — from Harry Potter to Katniss Everdeen — are related to this generic hero and his journey. He appears in the lesson “What makes a hero?” in which educator Matthew Winkler walks you through the characteristics and life paths that all heroes have in common.
	How did the Earth, not to mention all of space, begin? In this lesson from CERN physicist Tom Whyntie, “The beginning of the universe, for beginners,” we find out. The lesson stars a talking sun, but the highlight for us is the appearance of Edwin Hubble, the scientist who first noticed that our universe is expanding — evidence of the big bang.
	We love this fireman and dog from the lesson “Capturing authentic narratives,” from Michele Weldon. The lesson lays out the basics of good journalism — asking interesting questions while interviewing sources from official channels, sources who were affected by the story and sources who have interesting background information.

This milestone would not be possible without the brilliant educators and talented animators who have contributed to the TED-Ed initiative, making curiosity-inspiring Lessons available to people all around the globe. These collaborators have put great efforts — and many late hours — into each Lesson. And it shows.

In honor of our first birthday, we’d like to celebrate our top 10 most-watched videos so far, on topics ranging from chemistry to Shakespeare to origami.

1. How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries by Adam Savage: 969,931 views
2. Questions no one knows the answer to from Chris Anderson: 889,724 views
3. Sex determination: More complicated than you thought courtesy of Aaron Reedy: 889,022 views
4. Just how small is an atom? asks Jonathan Bergmann: 763,982 views
5. What’s invisible? More than you think by John Lloyd: 531,415 views
6. How big is infinity? from Dennis Wildfogel: 507,805 views
7. Why can’t we see evidence of alien life? asks Chris Anderson: 469,687 views
8. The secret life of plankton by Tierney Thys: 428,630 views
9. Insults by Shakespeare courtesy of April Gudenrath: 402, 630 views
10. How folding paper can get you to the moon from Adrian Paenza: 401,127 views

Here’s to ten more!

Check out the TED-Ed blog »

While the majority of the TED Fellows headed to TED2013 to give talks on their incredible work, a smaller group headed to TEDActive, representing the program while embedded in the Palm Springs action. Artist Colleen Flanigan was among them, and created this adorable, Scrabble-themed animation to represent the Fellows there with her. Here’s what she had to say about the work:

“While at TED Active, I found my way into The Study, a place to explore TED-Ed. I had so much fun playing with iStopMotion that I wanted to make something for the Late Night with the Fellows, a short looping intro on the monitor at the House of Design at the La Quinta Resort.

During the last session on Wednesday, I stayed in The Study and cut out little construction paper symbols to represent each of the fabulous Fellows here this week. It was a quick attempt at portraying a tiny bit of what they do for their work. For example, Esther Chae is on an arrow since she created and performs the dramatic So the Arrow Flies, about a Korean spy, and David Gurman is on a bell as he created an installation art piece, Nicholas Shadow, in which a church bell tolled to mark the death of innocent civilians during the war in Iraq.

All the members of the TED-Ed team are incredibly fun and talented; they helped me set up the area to create a short animation sequence for the evening. I spent a couple peaceful playful hours moving things around. After years of making armatures for stop-motion puppets, it was liberating to actually experiment with capturing the movement and witness with wonder the linking shots.

Making this TED-Ed video required (a) a lot of knitting and (b) a ton of boxes of Nerds.

When it came time to animate the lesson “How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones?” from educator George Zaidan, our TED-Ed animators had a crazy idea for how to make cell division come alive — using seeds and beans to animate what healthy cells look like as they divide in an orderly pattern and brightly colored candies to show how cancer cells divide quickly and wildly. They also had a good idea for how to show the way cells make up organs of the body—yarn, some knotted, some spooled, some purled and some crocheted.

Sure, cancer doesn’t sound like the most fun topic for an animation. But this lesson explains how chemotherapy works, and why it has such terrible side effects — showing how cancer’s strength is also its weakness. And because the process of making this animation was so fascinating, we asked director Biljana Labovic and animator Lisa Labracio to tell us about how they arrived at this approach.

Nerds? Seeds? Tell us a bit about the visual inspiration and your choice of materials.

Biljana: ”It’s all about growth.” That line from the script inspired me to start thinking how I could make cells physically GROW. Materializing them out of something physical seemed like a good starting point, and seeds seemed like a perfect symbolic material to represent the idea of growth. So I started looking at different type of seeds. Some were too small or too big to animate. Eventually, I expended into grains to create a variety of colors, textures and sizes to play with. I went from white couscous to dark azuki beans, and stayed in the range of brown tones — natural food colors. Combining the seeds and grains allowed us to create a variety of different looking cells, but we ended up using only two — hair cells and liver cells.

Once we animated the healthy seed cell, I wanted apply the same philosophy and visual style to creating a cancer cell. The first thing that came to my mind was candy — food full of processed sugar. My original idea was to use different kinds of jelly beans, but they were a little too big compared to our seeds, so I decided to go with Nerds. Their texture and size was much easier to handle for animation. In contrast to the natural seeds and grains, the colors were very unnatural. In addition, we later digitally adjusted the colors to make them feel even more off.

How did you turn the individual pieces into moving, dividing cells?

Lisa: I began by watching several microscopic videos of cell division, which I used as a reference to create a hand-drawn line animation to serve as a guide for my stop-motion animation. With the cancer cell, for example, the purple candies were gathered together as the nucleus, which were surrounded by multi-colored candies as the cytoplasm. Using a series of tools — including chopsticks and tweezers — I moved the candy bits individually into each position of cell division. After each cell was in place, I would take a picture. All of these steps were done by hand, with a camera and stop-motion software to capture the individual frames.

Did you have to do more digital animation?

Lisa: I shot all of the stop-motion animation against a green screen. This was important, because later when you see several cells dividing on screen at once, I was able to duplicate animation in order to fill the screen with cells. Then, in the scene where we portrayed the effects of chemotherapy on liver, hair, AND cancer cells while all were simultaneously dividing, I was able to shoot the individual cell divisions, and composite them as a whole. This saved me from having to organize and shoot all of that animation under the camera at once, which could literally take weeks! Also, the cell membranes — which were doilies for the healthy cells and plastic plates for the cancer cells — were animated and incorporated with the cell animation in the computer.

How did you design the human body?

Biljana: I started to think of the human body and organs as a very delicate creation and, once again, I wanted to use natural organic materials for everything healthy. Yarn came to mind. I was going through some stock footage of yarn patterns and knitted or crouched ornaments, making a parallel to how each organ is a carefully “knitted” object. I came across a multi-colorful twined ball of yarn and this perfectly represented the brain. Then we put knitted gloves for the hands. Our artist Celeste “digitally crocheted” a few organs like the stomach and lungs using Photoshop. We took photographs of twisted yarn for the intestines, etc. The rest of the body had a nice wavy purl pattern representing the blood flowing.

What were you hoping to communicate to your young TED-Ed audience with this video? 

Biljana: During the early development period for this animation, I was reading a lot about cell division, cancer and chemotherapy, but I was also thinking a lot about healthy lifestyles and foods, and how to convey that message in this video. I was hoping that I could inspire our young audience, perhaps even subconsciously, to be more aware of the food they eat — especially processed sugar. Interestingly enough, the conversations and debates over healthy diet and vegetarianism vs. eating meat exploded on our YouTube channel within minutes of the video being posted. The message apparently came through.

You may remember Susan Cain’s revolutionary talk from TED2012, on the quiet, unseen power of introverts. Careful to acknowledge that many of us hold both extroverted and introverted traits, she points out that many of our most publically treasured figures have introverted tendencies — yet we still “favor the man of action over the man of contemplation.” Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, delves further into why this discrimination occurs.

We stumbled upon this brand new web series based on Quiet, created and narrated by Daniel Widfeldt Lomas and animated by Petri Ltajif. In this delightfully illustrated first episode, Lomas lays out the adjectives associated with introversion: lazy, slow and boring. But to think of introverts in a disparaging way doesn’t give credit to the many gifts they may hold: their ability to work deliberately, their strong concentration and their love of contemplation. Echoing Cain’s work, Lomas shares the many complex personalities that our introvert-or-extrovert model fails to encompass.

Subscribe to the series’ YouTube channel to be updated when they release their next episode.

In the TED-Ed lesson “Magical metals, how shape memory alloys work,” animator Andy London had a creative idea for how to bring a science lesson from Ainissa Ramirez to life — by putting faces and matchstick limbs on bologna to create walking, talking atoms. This materials science lesson teaches that, in certain metals, atoms are able to rearrange themselves like a marching band into specific formations in different states. This property has proved very useful in surgery and robotics, as well as in architecture. (Watch Doris Kim Sung’s TED Talk, “Metal that breathes.)

Below, a few questions with London about how his deli meat animation came to be. 

So how did you land on using bologna as atoms in your TED-Ed lesson? 

Well I went to a Family Dollar store and obsessively looked through candy–Reese’s, Smarties, Skittles, etc. Everything was too small or just didn’t work as atoms. So we went to the frozen food section and found bologna. It was big enough and plain enough!

I actually ate the bologna afterwards. Everybody got mad at me because everyone thought I’d get sick from it since it was from the dollar store.

It seems like you use a lot of different materials throughout your animations. How do you create this style?

I walk around with my iPhone, taking photos throughout the day. When I drop my son off at daycare, when I teach, when I’m walking on the street — I get texture from things like old fire alarm boxes, whatever I see. After capturing these materials, I think about setting a scene with them.

I really like to capture food. For example, I like to pitch people as pancakes and bagels — bread in particular is a simple enough shape and the texture is mild enough (as in, it’s not so busy) that it lends itself well to bodies, etc. 

We’ve watched the TED-Ed lesson a few times now, and we have to ask: What are the weirdest things in it that we may not even have noticed?

Well, there’s a chicken bone somewhere in the animation. And the rocket ship in the beginning of the lesson is a telephone poll that had duct tape on it.

This post originally ran on the newly launched TED-Ed blog. Check in there for regular segments like “Meet the Educator.”

And to read more about Andy London, head to LondonSquared.net. London and his wife, Carolyn, are known for their 2004 short film “Backbrace,” that won Best Animation at the New York Television Festival and honorable mentions at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and the Woodstock Film Festival. Stay tuned for a new TED-Ed video from them in the next few weeks.

Jon Ronson got by with a little help from two friends at TED2012 as he told the story of Tony, a man who faked insanity when facing jail time after a fight — but did it far too well, ending up in a psychiatric hospital for 14 years under the label of “a psychopath.” Standing onstage with Jon, Evan Grant created a wall of animation to illustrate the cautionary tale about the dangers of labeling. Meanwhile Julian Treasure appeared on stage too, crafting a live soundscape for the story, giving it a creepy, told-around-the-campfire feel.

Jon gives the highest marks to both his collaborators.

“Julian does audio in a really empathetic, understated way,” Jon tells the TED Blog. “He’d get so annoyed if we were walking through a building together and the ambient noise was disturbing — but not disturbing in a way that would disturb people who aren’t totally attuned to this. Julian cares a lot about how things sound.”

He adds about Evan, “Because we were working with that enormous backdrop — that fantastic wall — it felt to me like the visuals were a completely overwhelming, immersive experience.”

Since both Evan and Julian happen to be TED alums, below, check out each of their wonderful TEDTalks.

Evan Grant spoke at TEDGlobal 2009, explaining the fascinating field of cymatics. In this talk “Making sound visible,” Evan delves into his work collecting auditory data — from natural phenomenon like dolphin calls and water ripples, as well as from the likes of Beethoven and Pink Floyd — and rendering it into ever-morphing images.

Also speaking at TEDGlobal 2009, Julian Treasure gave this fascinating talk “The 4 ways sound affects us,” revealing how sound evokes chemical reactions in the body, alters our psychological states, shapes our cognitive experiences, and influences our behavior.

A year later, Julian returned to the TEDGlobal stage for the talk “Shh! Sound health in 8 steps.” In it he describes a plan for how we can restore our tenuous relationship with sound and be kinder to our ears.

A year later, Julian spoke at TEDGlobal again, giving the talk “5 ways to listen better.” Julian points out that while we constantly hear, we aren’t very good at absorbing data and can only recall about 25% of what we hear. He suggests a few easy ways to make sure we don’t lose the ability to consciously listen, especially to each other.

And stayed tuned to the TED Blog. Later today, we’ll have a Q&A with Jon Ronson about his experience with the psychopath test and how it illuminates the gray areas of psychology.

Mission: Radical spreading from a uniform block to a more freeform organic experimental shape.

Director’s statement: “I wanted to create an explosion of vector abstract pop and colored animation. Organic and geometric shapes, characters growing around the central information.” — Superdeux

Direction and design: Superdeux www.superdeux.com
Animation and sound design: Friends Of Mine www.friendsofmine.tv

Agency: WE ARE Pi www.wearepi.com
Planner: Alex Bennett-Grant
Producer: Jamie Nami Kim
Creative Directors: Hobson-Chant

We end TEDGlobal2012 with a session that steps back and asks, “How do we, as a society, communicate with each other?” The public sphere, the place where we engage with society at large, has undergone tremendous change — driven and empowered by the digital revolution, but also, perhaps, by a deeper human urge to connect. We’ll hear about changes in the arts, in how we argue, and how we debate.

In this session:

Kirby Ferguson, the creator of “Everything Is a Remix,” talks about how the arts have always borrowed and copied from past artists. He’ll talk about that, and share his thoughts on current copyright law.

Media and society theorist Clay Shirky brings a bold new talk — positing that the history of the world is really the history of … arguing.

Michael Anti (Zhao Jing) is a key figure in China’s new journalism, exploring the growing power of the Chinese internet, which boasts some 500 million netizens–including 200 million microbloggers on sites like Sina Weibo. It’s not a western-style space, Anti clarifies, but for China it is revolutionary: It’s the first national public sphere.

For his new book, Andrew Blum visited the places where the internet exists in physical form: the cables and switches and servers that virtually connect us. Take a quick tour of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet.

How do organizations think? In her new book, Wilful Blindness, and in trenchant articles, Margaret Heffernan examines why businesses (and people) ignore the obvious. We sidestep touchy issues to avoid conflict, but as she says: “Conflict is thinking. And organizations that don’t have any conflict aren’t thinking.”