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The Karoo Origins project was built around the Rubidge fossil collection and the centrepiece was always planned to be the Permian waterhole animation that would show a slice of life from the late Permian period, just before the biggest mass extinction event in the history of the world, often called the Great Dying. The problem is that many people have very little knowledge of these things. Most visitors know a little about dinosaurs and have heard about extinctions either in relation to them, or from more modern times. Many people know very little about what happened before the dinosaurs. 

The exhibition obviously looks at fossils and what we learn from them, and this leads into a story of environmental change, evolution, and mass extinctions. Some pretty complex and heavy stuff. Without some basic understanding, it can be overwhelming or confusing. 

We decided that we would create two short looping animations that we could use to explain some of the basics of this complex story. We needed to make this attractive and engaging, especially for children, and pack in as many concepts as possible. We also wanted to focus on what animation does best - visual, dynamic story telling. We chose to use a cut out style of animation that would keep costs down, but would allow us to develop a rich, illustrative style. 

So an obvious first subject is continental drift. It's an enormously complex system that takes hundreds of millions of years. It’s quite hard to wrap your head around, but when you see it animated on a globe it starts to make a lot more sense. So we created a simplified version of how continental drift works starting with an explanation of the basic mechanisms that drive it. We used this alongside other information, such as time, measured in millions of years ago, as well as animations highlighting extinction events and the evolving life on Earth. We also constructed a visual of stratigraphy and fossils to measure time against it, thereby creating  a visual presentation of what evidence we have and where it came from. This also had the important function of relating time to rocks. After all, the history of the Earth is recorded in the rocks that it is made of. 

We developed a short sequence to show how fossils form, linking this to how they are found and excavated. Through this we linked the story to the environment around Graaff-Reinet. 

We were able to take the reconstructions of environments and animals that we had done in very high fidelity realism for 3d animation and sculpture and reimagine them for simple 2d animation and illustration. It was important that visitors were able to recognise the animals, plants and environments across the whole exhibition. This also gave us an opportunity to show more of these animals. 

Most importantly we showed how continental drift has driven environmental change over time, which has driven evolution of life on Earth. This is a very big concept, but an important one. The power of animation is incredible for this - we kept them short and made them beautiful to watch. Visitors love to sit for a few moments rest and we could use this as an opportunity to share easily digestible information. Over 4 key sequences in the videos we show what Graaff-Reinet would have looked like 300 million years ago, when it was covered by a frozen sea, 255 million years ago when the therapsids dominated the land, the rapidly changing environment of the Great Dying, and 240 million years ago in the early Triassic, as cynodonts evolved toward becoming mammals and archosaurs toward becoming dinosaurs.