Grant-funded Locust Research Docuseries on Phenotypic Plasticity

Link to learn more and watch all three episodes here: https://behavioralplasticity.org/index.php/video-docuseries/

My Role: Producer, script writer

Backstory: A group of scientists with the Behavioral Plasticity Research Institute came to my team to document their important work and fulfill an educational video aspect of their important three-year-long grant. I was very excited to produce this docu-series for the organization, which describes itself as "a cross-institutional, cross-disciplinary Biology Integration Institute to comprehensively dissect locust phase polyphenism and use it as a model system to transform the study of phenotypic plasticity."

With my science-geek side fully engaged, I worked with the client to both meet their restricted budget and also tell a story that spans the globe. We interviewed our first batch of researchers as they (conveniently) met for a conference in Houston. Then we took a trip to two of the universities involved to visit their labs. We stepped foot into a quarantined facility full of insects, as well as a very advanced facility using CRISP-r to edit DNA and research exact neurons involved in certain behavioral responses.

Challenges: With a bigger budget, we would have been flying to be with researchers in the field, but that was not possible on this project. So, I had the job of gathering and logging visual content from all of the interviewees as well as locating available footage from stock and government sources. Since this was a long-term project, keeping up with these sources, how to credit them and keeping consistency across multiple post-production crew was not easy. Communicating with the editor about which b-roll went with which researcher was a constant back-and-forth.

Successes: Interviewing these subjects and writing the scripts created a massive learning experience for me. I had to understand the topic very deeply, to be able to piece together the story on paper before the editor could start. I can now give my own lecture on locusts. (My nephews can attest to this.) Also, the series turned out great and the client was very happy with the results.