For me, enjoying a museum visit has always required a leap of imagination. After all, a glass case or a room barrier inherently separates you from objects. interpretive animations as short-form video are one way to get a visitor into a state where they can better understand the context is which a space, object or event “lived” its historical purpose due to its interaction with humans.

I experimented with this concept as part of a partnership with University of the Arts in Philadelphia, my colleague Michal Meyer, and animation instructor John Serpentelli. Abstracting the object or story with animation helped focus the work on imaginative storytelling and interpretation rather than simply illustrating an artifact.

The surviving project reports make clear that this was a multi-semester collaboration rather than a single class exercise. The fall 2013 cycle produced animations based on Fairyland of Chemistry books and alchemical art; the following spring moved into subjects including Bakelite and ballooning. That repetition mattered because the partnership itself was being refined alongside the animations.

Here is a playlist of animations produced as part of this partnership.

Some are definitely better than others, but they increased in quality as we refined the process. One challenge was getting students sufficiently grounded in the meaning of the source material and the desired outcomes for audiences. These were semester-long animation projects, so production stretched across several months and some pieces were never quite finished. The lesson for me was that the hard part was not animation software; it was building enough shared understanding among museum staff, subject specialists, instructors and student artists for interpretation to emerge.

Overall, I think they turned out wonderfully. My personal favorite is an animation of an old alchemical painting the organization had, which explained what was going on through the eyes of a creature featured in it. Here’s a preview to the high-resolution source image for that from Wikimedia Commons (click for original):

I saw that painting almost every workday for three years. It captured my imagination all on its own, and was a no-brainer for this project. To give the student work a public life beyond the classroom, we premiered it as part of a live #HistChem webcast on comics and graphic novels, with the UArts students and Serpentelli joining as special guests. The same monthly theme also extended into CHF’s Tumblr content. In retrospect, the useful model was not simply museum + animation class; it was collections → student interpretation → animation → themed social content → live public conversation.

Drawing History: Telling the Stories of Science through Comics and Graphic Novels from ChemHeritage on Vimeo.

There are many examples of museums using animations as pre-visit prep (manners in the museum) as seen below, but few featuring sophisticated storytelling and animation.

There are also examples of animations being used in museum interactives, such as these at the Benjamin Franklin Museum.

I looked for examples of interpretive animations produced by other cultural institutions, and they are hard to find. If you know of something out there, please link to it in the comments. Of course, there are many examples of object-inspired animated GIFs being used throughout social media, but that’s another post.

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Archive note — September 2026: The University of the Arts, whose animation students partnered on this experiment, closed abruptly in June 2024 after nearly 150 years of institutional history. That gives these student collaborations an unexpected archival weight of their own. The production technology has become easier since 2017, but the hard part identified here has not: interpreters and artists still need enough shared understanding of the source material, audience and desired meaning to turn animation into interpretation rather than decoration. The partnership mattered as much as the medium.