The intrepid, Elise Mahon, contacted me about making some ecology animations to accompany her piece highlighting the work of UW professor, Dr. Monica Turner. Loving Yellowstone and interested to learn more about the ecology and future of the forests, I jumped at the chance.

Dr. Turner wanted to include the specific species involved in this story of fire, recovery, and loss. We included different species of trees, forbs, grasses, graminoids, birds, and small mammals.

Please view the whole video, including Elise's spectacular nature videography at: UW News.

Here is the segment with the animations that I drew:

I drew the individual species and forest scenes in Adobe Illustrator, and then animated them Adobe After Effects. The video wound up being in 4K resolution, which was higher than originally planned. Thankfully, all my drawings were vector based (as usual), so they were able to be scaled to any size, which would have been impossible with pixel-based drawings.

Elise was a pleasure to work with, and I hope we get to make more projects together in the future!