There are two types of people in this world, and they often share a bed. There are those who toss and turn, wrestling with falling – and staying – asleep, and there are those blessed with the ability to nod off the moment their head hits the pillow, regardless of their surrounds.
No matter which side of the bed you fall onto, Sleeping With Friends, a YouTube Originals reality competition show by science communicator Vanessa Hill, has a way of both pulling you deep into the science of sleep while making it completely relatable to your everyday. It’s a hallmark of the videos on BrainCraft, the YouTube channel that launched Hill’s career.
As a behavioural scientist, Hill understands what makes us tick. But her choice to communicate that knowledge through video developed quite organically.
After studying science and creative writing at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, Hill went on to work at the CSIRO (Australia’s science agency) for six years, initially as an education and outreach officer. It was, she says, “the coolest job”, and took her to schools in NSW, the Northern Territory and North Queensland.
“I was the fun science incursion. I would come and do liquid nitrogen and dry ice shows and run forensics workshops. It was a really good initiation into the world of science communication,” Hill told The Brilliant.
During her outreach travels, she took photos of people and places on “old cameras that were always breaking”. This collection of images formed the basis of her blog, which caught the attention of the CSIRO media team and saw her moving into a role with them. What she uncovered there was a content treasure trove – archival footage from the film unit dating back to the 1950s. Hill started to digitise the collection and came up with a strategy to release short clips on YouTube at a time when CSIRO didn’t have much of a presence on social media. The first video she uploaded in 2012 was of a kangaroo giving birth. Filmed in the 1960s, it was fascinating and graphic, and it garnered well over 600,000 views.
“That really caught the attention of a lot of people [at CSIRO], and they started really investing in YouTube,” says Hill. “I started doing a lot of work through them on YouTube.”
Hill started watching other educational content on the platform and saw three notable absences: a lack of content about psychology or neuroscience (her major in her undergraduate degree); no big-name Australian YouTubers; few female content creators.
“I was kind of annoyed by that,” Hill says. “I was at a point in my career where I was looking to do something more creative and I thought, ‘Well, if there’s no-one doing that, perhaps it should be me.’”
In 2014, Hill launched her own YouTube channel, BrainCraft. To start with, she treated it as a side gig, like a creative portfolio to prepare her for her next career move. Then one of her first videos, The Amazing Effects of Sleep (and Lack of it), went viral. It crept up on her, she recalls. “I went to a friend’s wedding in Newcastle for the weekend. I uploaded it on a Friday. On Sunday, I’m coming back on the train and I check my email and I have thousands and thousands of emails from YouTube and they’re all notifications. I hadn’t turned off email notifications because I didn’t have any subscribers,” she says.
Bedroom to big-time
Hill is the first to admit she didn’t know a lot about video production or animation when she began making this content. Confident in her writing skills, she thought, “I could write a script, and then do the voiceover, and just kind of figure out what the visuals look like.” Initially she was nervous about appearing on camera, wanting to put the science “front and centre”. With no experience with animation software, she set out to create very simple stop-motion animation from scratch.
“I lived near 24-hour Kmart,” says Hill. “I went there at midnight, bought all of this coloured paper and some scissors and a little camping table and light. In the corner of my bedroom, I started cutting things out, taking photos of them, and moving them across the table. It’s funny, because in terms of animation, stop-motion is one of the most time-consuming and difficult styles of animation, if you do it professionally. But at the time, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was just moving bits of paper across the table. That was the first style that I did.”
Within eight months of launching BrainCraft, Hill was approached by American public broadcaster PBS, which gave her the opportunity to move to the US to work alongside producers in Brooklyn, New York City. Working with PBS was a gamechanger for Hill. “They gave me resources, like budget, to create episodes and such. That was definitely the draw to working with them. But credibility and profile, they go along with it,” she says.
In 2017, Hill collaborated with PBS and Screen Australia to direct and host Mutant Menu, a long-form documentary exploring new gene-editing technologies. “It was a really hot new technique in science,” she says. “It had a lot of promise, but there really hadn’t been any big articles that had been written about it.”
The following year, she directed Attention Wars, an online exploration of the behavioural psychology behind social media.
Closing the loop
After six years with PBS, producing 40 videos a year largely on her own, Hill left to work as an independent producer. Looking back over her 15 years as a science communicator, she acknowledges that many initiatives she’s been a part of have been geared towards people who already love science. Now she wants to reach out beyond that audience.
“What I’ve been trying to do is to figure out how can we reach people who wouldn’t think about science in the way that we do, or who aren’t exposed to research,” she says.
Sleeping with Friends aims to do just that. “It was essentially a reality show where we had contestants come in and, and be like, ‘What’s this?’ We used all these different sleep techniques and talked about how bad their sleep was and tried to fix it,” she says.
But just as science is a strange new world to the uninitiated, science communication, especially on social media platforms, is unknown territory for many researchers. “A lot of scientists that I speak to…don’t even realise that people like me exist,” says Hill. “They think science communication jobs only exist at museums, or maybe at CSIRO, or at an institution,” Hill says.
Incorporating social impact into grants is the way forward, she says.
Hill has seen increasing diversity in who presents science across traditional and social media. On television, which has long been the bastion of the white, male science presenter, “I have seen a lot more opportunities for female scientists hosting things directly”. says Hill. “The women who are doing this are just incredible. They’re brilliant science communicators in their own right.”
To budding science communicators who are wanting to follow her path into video, Hill suggests getting onto TikTok rather than YouTube. “I think YouTube’s fantastic, but it has a really high barrier to entry,” she says. “You need to have filming equipment. You need to have good audio. You need to be able to edit. There are tools on TikTok and Instagram that make science communication so accessible in a way that YouTube doesn’t quite yet.”
More than that, audiences and content creators on TikTok are younger and more diverse, she points out. “On YouTube, you don’t have a lot of ethnic diversity. It’s still a blokey platform, whereas TikTok is just so progressive. I would say that is probably a better place if you’re starting out, to try to make it,” she says.
Follow Vanessa Hill on YouTube | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | TikTok
Article by Kylie Ahern
Photo Credit: Zaza Weissgerber
Comments are closed.