Working with Dinosaurs
Telling stories hundreds of millions of years in the making.
I work for an experience design company called Sandpit. We primarily work in museums and galleries across Australia, and for the past couple of years, we’ve been developing a specialty; telling the story of what life looked like before humans were here to see it. As you can imagine, it’s challenging to accurately depict worlds that no one has ever seen before, so we’ve developed some key principles that guide our work across the board.
Find the drama
My job title at Sandpit is ‘Content Strategist’, which is a fancy way of saying storyteller. I have a background in theatre, so for me, storytelling is about finding the drama. Telling scientific stories might seem dry at first glance, but I’ve found that it’s not hard to set high stakes. For example, one of the projects we’re engaged on tells the story of the first animals to move on the planet. We’re talking about the origins of all animal life on Earth here. I don’t know if it gets much more dramatic than that. When we’re telling stories like this, it’s our job to impress upon visitors the sheer significance of what they’re seeing. We want to inspire awe in them. To do that, need to give them a dramatic, emotive, hands-on experience rather than an intellectual one because those are the stories they’ll remember.
The art of time
Often the conundrum we’re faced with is “how do you help people understand time?” It’s a doozy. For example; how do you explain what five hundred and fifty million years means to a ten-year-old? We’ve tried all sorts of things, but eventually, we always come to the same conclusion; It’s so far outside of our experience that it’s nothing short of mind-blowing. Deep time is intellectually unfathomable, but we’re convinced it can be felt. So we turn to abstraction as so many have done before us. Colour, light, movement and a musical score will do a lot more to communicate the epic nature of time than numbers and words will. We bring science and art together to take visitors to places that neither would be able to illustrate alone.
Trust the science
At Sandpit, we’re not scientific subject matter experts, but we often have the incredible privilege of working with them, and nothing is more important in those relationships than trust. In some instances, specialists are handing their life’s work over to us. They’re entrusting us to tell stories that sit at the core of who they are. We’ve worked with the foremost experts in the world on the Ediacara Biota and South Australian megafauna, and with Kulin Nations elders who have shared with us their sacred creation stories. It’s so important that we take that privilege seriously and that we match their passion. We become obsessed with details and we bury ourselves in research because we know that no story we could come up with will be more impressive, more interesting, or more profound than the real one.
Respect the bird
We recently delivered Act 3 of Horridus: Fate of the Dinosaurs at Melbourne Museum. It focuses on dinosaurs' only living descendants: birds. Our motto on that project became ‘Respect the bird’. When we’re working with animal narratives, we work hard to resist the urge to anthropomorphise them. Instead, we push to maintain the integrity of their ‘animalness’. To respect their intelligences and the incredible roles they play within their ecosystems and within the story of life. We shouldn’t need to make them cute and cuddly in order to make them interesting. What’s cooler than being a living, breathing modern-day dinosaur? It’s so easy to slip into a way of thinking that places humans at the centre of the world, but it’s so much more interesting to recognise how complex, interconnected, and irreplaceable all life is.
History is always changing
Before Sandpit began specialising in natural history experiences, we naively might have thought that palaeontology was an exact science. These days, we see it more as a series of theories that are endlessly re-written. Palaeontologists propose theories based on all of the pieces of the puzzle that they can see, but as time moves forward, more pieces of the puzzle are uncovered. The story of the ancient is continually rewritten the further we move away from it. As you can imagine, this is very tricky to navigate when you’re designing a museum installation that is going to be up for ten-plus years. We’ve navigated this problem on a fossil project in Nilpena, deep in the South Australian outback, by inviting visitors into the conversation. Rather than creating a false hierarchy where we know everything and they must passively receive it, we show them the clues, explain the theories, and invite them to consider the past as a puzzle we’re all solving together.
Foster curiosity
The projects we’ve worked on that have helped us develop these principles are hugely varied. They traverse immense time periods and have been realised in so many starkly different ways. We’ve brought giant kangaroos, pre-historic snakes, jellyfish and a flock of galahs to life. But in every instance, the quality that serves us best is our curiosity. We stay curious about the unique ways that stories unfold, and think laterally about how we might tell them. Because at the end of the day, we want to inspire that same sense of curiosity in the visitors who experience what we make. If we can do that, then we’ve done our job.
