A multi award-winning short, Biopixels has screened at over 30 film festivals worldwide, as well as dozens of venues, events and film platforms such as The Exploratorium, Labocine, and San Francisco’s Roxie Theater Mixtape #7.
In 2015, I found myself in Northern Peru, an unlikely assistant to a team of lepidopterists from UC Berkeley and the French National Center for Scientific Research . My friend, biologist Arnaud Martin, recruited me for my knowledge of plants and I was entrusted with collecting host plants for the glasswing butterflies the team was studying.
I’d been to the tropics before, but my previous experiences didn’t prepare me for the magically dense forests I encountered in the Amazonas region.
Our base was in Tarapoto at a small research station for teams studying the ecosystems of the Cordilleras - Amazonas transition zone. My mornings were spent scouring the nearby jungle for host plants, while afternoons I met up with the team for collecting in more remote areas.
To reach the deeper jungle, we joined local workers on the edge of town waiting for rides. Clambering into a pickup, we sat in the back with the sounds of the forest and Spanish conversations around us, and at an unmarked point, we disembarked. Following a trail, we watched for the dart of a glasswing, and opened the leaves of bromeliads in search of the jeweled flash of a frog. Time distorted in the green embrace, and in late afternoon we’d emerge and hitchhike back to town.
Our minds drifted to the possibilities of merging art and science with the threads of our experiences. Some of these dreams eventually took flight. I scored short films for Nipam Patel, the director of Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and worked with Arnaud through his new lab at George Washington University reviving science films from the Smithsonian Archives…
I often recalled looking under the microscope where butterfly wings appeared as micro mosaics and tiny abstract paintings. Each magnification at 500 and 1000x delighted and astonished me, and I wanted to share these hidden intricacies along with the surprisingly little understood story of structural color, which related to Arnaud and Nipam’s research.
In 2022, together with animator Brandon McFarland, we created short films to tell these stories.
The diversity of butterflies and moths, constituting one in nine of every species on Earth, with approximately 180,000 known species, presented an endless canvas for our first film, Biopixels.
At Woods Hole, with the guidance of Nipam and his post-docs, I immersed myself in microscopy, often imaging late into the night, captivated by what was revealed through the latest cutting-edge light microscopes.
In Biopixels, none of the images were manipulated. At various focal depths each wing, from one end to the other, could appear entirely different. In creating the film, I imagined each frame as a nod to the artistic brilliance of Richard Diebenkorn and Norman McLaren, accompanied by strings and percussion composed of slowly expanding motifs, to mimic the intricacies of evolutionary development and speciation.
From the Patel Lab’s collection, images of some of the gorgeous creatures featured in Biopixels
