Educational video (3b1b style) on chaos

Hello,

I’ve made an educational video about chaos! It’s something I wanted to do for a long time, and the recent announcement of Summer of Math Exposision by 3Blue1Brown gave me the final push. It uses DynamicalBilliards.jl, DynamicalSystems.jl, InteractiveDynamics.jl and Makie.jl Have a look here if you are interested: Explanation of the butterfly effect and deterministic chaos using billiards - YouTube

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Hi, I really enjoyed this video. Can you talk about how you made it? What tools in Julia did you use? What video editing tools? What audio tools? How much time did it take? Did you storyboard it? I’d like to do some videos as well but would like to know more about the process. Also I’d like to do some animations (not graphing just, characters or moving objects, arranging things on screen etc etc) did you have a tool for that? Thanks for any info you can provide.

WOW! George this is outstanding! I would be super curious to hear about your process in creating this and how you created the apparent “physics” component to your animation (i.e. arrows bouncing off walls inside a box, collisions, etc.). Also, happily working through the intro Makie Tutorial (finally!)

CC @Wikunia @cormullion @arsh @Ved_Mahajan

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Outstanding work, George :star_struck:

Based on the other comments and I will second it, it seems you will need to produce a “behind the scenes” video or do it live the next time! No pressure :wink:

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Makie for the animations according to the youtube comments.

Scripts are here https://github.com/JuliaDynamics/ChaosThroughBilliards

@TheCedarPrince , @dlakelan , @helgee thanks!

The packages i’ve used were DynamicalSystems.jl, DynamicalBilliards.jl, InteractiveDynamics.jl and Makie.jl (and also a keyword argument from OrdinaryDiffEq.jl). Nothing else. I did the composition in PowerPoint as well as some minor animations like moving text or enclosing something in rectangles.

I didn’t use any audio tools. I bought a backing audio track online from the 3b1b library and put it as background. For the actual recording, I recorded myself using OBS, while playing the powerpoint animations (in fact, when slides change you will be able to hear a “click” as I was pressing the arrow in the keypad for next slide). I ported my recorded videos to whatever video editor like davinci resolve or kdenlive and just glued them together, put some audio in the background. It was really low production level.

I did storyboard the whole thing, very carefully as well. That was clearly the most important part. This also guided what kind of animations I would do in Makie.jl. I don’t think I can say more from a general perspective, everything else would be details about the specific video.

Kinda hard to estimate the time it took as I did it always on the sides. It took me 1-2 weeks of full time work perhaps? Notice that I didn’t have to “study” or “prepare” the topic, it was my bread and butter. So that would probably take more, perhaps just as much.

That was the job of DynamicalBilliards.jl. It was 1/3rd of my PhD! If you want to know about how it actually works, then read here: Internals · DynamicalBilliards.jl In fact, this highlights how amazing Makie.jl is. It doesn’t do the physics for you, it only does the animation. It just naturally integrates with whatever kind of simulation you can imagine, billiards, dynamical systems, agent based models. Observables for the win!

I’m actually going to upload a Makie.jl video tutorial on making interactive scientific animations. I’ll put it at the JuliaDynamics Youtube channel. I have already scripted the video, shouldn’t take long.

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That is what you called in the video “unpredictable deterministic chaos”? :slight_smile:

Thank you for the video Datseris. For interested in this subject I am recommending another video: Weather and Chaos: The Work of Edward N. Lorenz - Weather and Chaos: The Work of Edward N. Lorenz on Vimeo. I hope you do not mind me posting this link.

So 40-80 hours production time for that video really helps me get a realistic sense of what’s needed. thanks!

I noticed that as well while making the JuliaCon video. I completely underestimated the time it took. A normal presentation just doesn’t have multiple takes

I’ve made a tutorial on how I make scientific animations and interactive applications, have a look those who are interested in the process and wanna learn Makie.jl: Making animations and interactive applications in Makie.jl - YouTube

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