The Newark Museum
Newark, NJ
Nature, geology, and the links between them are featured in ‘Dynamic Earth’, the first permanent exhibit in the Newark Museum’s Victoria Hall of Science. Chedd-Angier-Lewis produced 14 media and interactive programs for Newark, starting with Diversity Sweep: a two-screen video introduction to the history of life on Earth narrated by James Earl Jones. Other important exhibits in the space include two on the subject of natural selection: The Seven Rules and Survival of the Finchest. The Seven Rules presented Chedd-Angier-Lewis producers with a unique challenge: to explain the basics of natural selection in a two-minute video, without the use of audio.
The end product was an elegant program depicting the seven “rules” as frames in a film strip; as the piece proceeds through each rule, it expands to full-screen and displays the rule in text, with illustrative video. Similarly, Survival of the Finchest challenged Chedd-Angier-Lewis to teach visitors about natural selection through an interactive game that would be original and unique. Chedd-Angier-Lewis developed Survival as a richly-illustrated, whimsical interactive board game in which the forces of nature work upon two groups of finches, with events determined by the wiles of chance...but the outcome decided by the groups’ relative abilities to fit into their common environment.