Original subtitles

[♪ peaceful music]

[laughing]

-Ahh!

I'm trying to look at the piece of grass,

but you came after me.

[laughing]

Trying to look at bugs, c'mon.

Wow!

Wow!

Yes!

Oh my God, oh, oh my God.

I am, what?

It's got orange armpit hairs!

It's got my nose.

Dude!

Look at this thing.

Ahh. Ha-ha, ha-ha!

[reporter] Anand Varma is known for his masterful combination of

art and technology.

[reporter] One of the most accomplished

nature photographers on the planet.

[reporter] With an unusual ability to find beauty

in mind-controlling parasites,

carnivorous bats, jellyfish.

[Anand Varma] I'm going to show you the first 21 days of

a bee's life, condensed into 60 seconds.

I love to bring attention to parts of the natural world that

we tend to think of as less important.

[camera shutters]

If you look more closely, that little bug or ant or crab

or fish is every bit as interesting as the bigger,

more charismatic lions and tigers.

I did bring my favorite T-shirt, so...

[laughter].

-Nature has lots and lots of secrets

and it doesn't particularly like to tell,

and along comes this guy who says I'm going to light you up.

[Anand Varma] There's a picture going every two minutes.

And, this camera is gonna move eight inches, in two days.

-You use his eye, and you see things you've never seen before.

-He's trying to do pictures that set people's brains on fire.

You know, make them curious,

make them care, make them wanna learn.

[Anand Varma] I think a photograph is a really powerful

way to just say hey...

[camera shutters]

there is a secret here.

Can I share it with you?

[camera shutter]

[♪ theme music plays]

[birds chirping]

[rooster crows]

[Anand Varma] Step one, assemble incubator,

prepping split loom, what did we say next?

-After that, getting the Mac mini.

[Anand Varma] Mount Mac minis.

Then I guess after that will be, start four time lapses.

Should be easy, right?

[cheeping]

An egg might not seem that remarkable at first glance.

But what happens hidden away inside that eggshell

is completely magical.

Over 21 days, a single cell transforms into feathers,

a beak, and feet, and eyes.

It becomes a chicken.

And that process of transformation,

it's what happens with us too.

It's what happens with pretty much every creature

on the planet.

I came across this scientific paper where

researchers had figured out how to raise chickens

outside of their shell.

I'm going to try to duplicate that in my workshop and make

a time-lapse video that shows a single cell developing into

a baby chick so that we can spy on that process.

This is the door, this is the side.

Photography is 5% of what I do.

Biology and engineering is 95% of it.

But, neither of us are formally trained engineers.

So it's a lot of like, ehh get me the stickier tape.

This video will be part of an exhibit at

the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

We've done a bunch of research, we've read those papers,

we've got all the tools, we've actually taken even some

new precautions to try to be extra hygienic

to prevent contamination.

Mark, can you hand me an intact egg?

But, it's biology.

You don't get to control every variable.

1,000 things can go wrong,

and we only have a few months to figure this out.

I mean it's not an amazing picture and I can automatically

see some of the challenges I'm going to have.

We'll figure out how to get fancy with the light next time.

I think that's it.

[camera shutter]

[Father] Anand, Anand.

[Anand Varma] My parents grew up in Southern India,

and I was born in Atlanta.

[laughter].

[laughter]

[Anand Varma] My dad was a doctor.

And one of the most broadly curious people

that I have ever met.

He would bring us to different lectures, films,

and I remember actually a French documentary

called Microcosmos.

My mom was a Montessori teacher and

one of the key tenets of Montessori education is

rewarding a child's intrinsic curiosity.

There's not a lot of structure to it,

there's just shelves of like cool things to go play with.

Our house was filled with weird bugs,

and birds' nests, and feathers, and sea shells.

And acres and acres of woods to explore.

[Father] Hey, why don't you get some fish feed?

Let's feed the fish.

-I'm picking up the dirt, so we can put it in the fish.

[Father] In the fish?

No. Not in the...

[Anand Varma] I was obsessed with fish.

And by the second year of high school,

I had eight aquariums.

I remember my dad telling me, you should be an ichthyologist,

and I learned what that word meant.

And I was like, "Guy who studies fish?"

Yes, that is me, I will do that for the rest of my life.

Photography wasn't really part of my childhood,

but my dad got a Nikon Coolpix and I was like,

"Hey, can I borrow this?"

[camera shutters]

In the beginning, it was just photographs of bugs and plants,

maybe landscapes.

But there was one day with my buddy, Gene,

where I came across this garter snake.

It's skittish, and so I'm like, trying to sneak up on this

snake without scaring it.

I got within two inches of its face and I took this picture and

my friend Gene is like, "Oh my God,

I can't believe you got that close to the snake,

that's so cool, look at all the details!"

From then on it became almost like a treasure hunt.

Wow, this is fun, like, I can take a picture

and get somebody excited.

I didn't realize it then, but that moment changed my life.

12 volt, 12 volt, that's the adaptor.

-Whatcha making?

[Anand Varma] I am trying to prevent the condensation when

I put the warm egg in a cooler container.

-Container. -So.

-What temperature are the eggs at?

-The eggs are 99 and a half degrees.

-Woah.

-Yeah, it's a bit of a tricky thing.

I borrowed your hair dryer last time that's why.

-Oh yeah, you did, I remember that.

-Yeah, I forgot to put it back, sorry.

So if this thing doesn't work, I'll have to use it again.

-Okay. -That's okay?

-Yeah. -Okay great.

[Anand Varma] Wanna see the first five days?

-Sure. -Okay.

Here we go.

First day or so, not much happens.

Oh, you can see its heart starting to beat right there.

[Mark Unger] Oh, that's crazy.

[Anand Varma] Look at that, oh my God.

Beyond that, of course, like that turning into a chicken,

there's a lot that has to happen,

but this is such a, it looks like a river delta.

And it's probably like what we look like as we grow.

Oh no. Something went wrong.

Okay, so the saran wrap eggs are not doing very well at all.

Two of the three totally failed.

The third one looks like it's about to fail.

Do you want to take a look at one with me?

[Mark Unger] Yes.

[Anand Varma] So this doesn't look right.

Thursday, yesterday, it dropped to 88.

[Mark Unger] How long did it drop for?

[Anand Varma] 12 hours? How did it drop that far?

Damn.

So it is 3:15 in the morning and all kinds of things had

gone wrong overnight.

Wow, that's a lot of rust.

Yuck.

One of the humidifiers stopped working,

the backup humidifier didn't work,

one box was 18 degrees hotter than it was supposed to be so

I've spent all day trying to troubleshoot that.

I think I've solved all the problems.

This one's at day 12.

God, it's like a little velociraptor foot there.

Ah, that's wild.

[Mark Unger] Look how much it's moving.

Oh, it looks like, is it blinking?

Oh wow.

-Yeah. Damn.

They're going.

[door opens]

Ah, it's not moving.

Ah, this is not looking good.

Didn't make it.

[Mark Unger] Oh, no.

[Anand Varma] That was the one that was still moving

last night, the other two.

-That was the biggest one?

-No, the biggest one stopped moving...

-Entirely?

-By 7:00 pm.

Honestly, I don't know what went wrong.

[birds chirping]

[grunting]

A lot of what I do feels like this

interesting engineering puzzle,

like, how do I solve all the variables and

how do I experiment,

but at the end of the day when your experiment goes wrong

that creature didn't make it.

This is a science project that has value to

the scientific community, this is a photography project that

has value to the public and communicating science,

but is that worth causing harm?

There is something that feels different about caring

for a creature that can look back at you.

I think it just means trying that much harder next time.

When I was young, I loved animals and I loved nature.

-And the valedictorian for the class of 2004 is...

Anand Varma!

[applause]

[Anand Varma] So, when it came time for college,

I left Atlanta and I came to Berkeley to study biology.

I took every kind of, "Ology," class I could.

So mammalogy, ornithology, herpetology.

My favorite class, we spent four hours every week

in the field learning how to identify frogs, snakes,

lizards, birds, and I'd have my camera with me.

One day my instructor sent me this email saying

there's a professional photographer

looking for an assistant,

this is a project for National Geographic Magazine,

maybe this is an opportunity that would interest you.

I had never heard of David Liittschwager.

I told him that I was interested in photography and

I was studying biology and he said that's nice,

that means you'll pay attention,

but really I just need to make sure you can carry a bag.

So, that was my first taste of professional photography.

That project with David was just a couple weeks,

but before the end of that trip, he said,

"You know I could use your help for my next project,

are you free in September?"

As much fun as I was having, I wasn't convinced that

I wanted to be a photographer.

I had put probably ten years of my life into this one goal

of being a scientist.

And I have to make a decision.

Do I drop my dream of becoming a marine biologist?

There was a conversation with my dad where he's like,

"Hey, what are you doing?

Do you have a plan here?"

And I didn't know what to tell him.

I was like, "I'm not totally sure."

And that... is scary.

But climbing trees in Costa Rica,

snorkeling in coral reefs, like I can't say no to this.

So in the fall, I withdrew from the university,

and I spent my whole senior year working for David.

[hammering]

It was my job to run around and catch the insects

and collect the plant.

[camera shutter]

David Liittschwager spent the 1980s working

for Richard Avedon.

Avedon was taking pictures of models,

famous celebrities, and the American West

against a white background.

David took this artificial background portraiture and

he applied that to nature and to insects and to moss.

My initial reaction was like, "What the hell is this?"

Why would you take a picture of an animal in an aquarium?

That's so silly.

But it was not long before I realized like,

the power of that style of photography.

[camera shutters]

[camera shutters]

I learned you can change the way a subject is portrayed,

the status of that subject.

And I saw the power of close observation,

of tiny weird undervalued creatures.

I'm like, wait a minute, what is that color,

what is that structure, look at this texture,

and this photograph is showing me something

that I never noticed.

[Robert Krulwich] I think Anand learned the meticulousness

of David, but I think he kept for himself

his own kind of hunger.

The way he looks at these critters is with

such close attention.

What he's really doing is he's falling in love with the animal

and with the mystery.

[Anand Varma] So far we have not been able to raise a chick

to hatching in the saran-wrapped dish,

and so we met some scientists who work with eggs

and who gave us some new pointers

on how to work with them.

[Mark Unger] Okay so, do you have all the tools you need?

[Anand Varma] Can you cut me just like one block of this

so I can have like...

-A single piece? -Single piece that I can rotate?

[Mark Unger] Yep.

[Anand Varma] I've seen this done once before,

I have never done it myself so

I am a little bit nervous about that part.

Here we go.

We're trying a new technique where we're actually gonna cut

little holes in the eggs so that I can see into the eggshell

but there's like, the least possible disturbance of embryos.

-That looks pretty good.

-I think so.

Okay, so we're going to try to glue this glass on here.

I honestly feel better about this.

[Mark Unger] It definitely looks better.

-It looks more...

I was gonna say professional

but there's a lot of hot glue so that might be premature.

-Professional egg windowers.

Working with Anand is like working with a mad scientist.

He has such a passionate and eccentric and focused energy,

but it can come in crazy waves of long, long nights

and then slow, focused, bigger-picture thinking.

[Anand Varma] This is a really nice one.

We have six incubators running, the temperature is all right,

there's enough water for the humidifiers to run.

I'm feeling good.

I really hope we've turned a corner here.

This is the most absurd flatworm I have ever seen.

Look at this thing.

[laughter].

I spent seven years working for David Liittschwager.

[whistles]

I have this developing relationship

with National Geographic and I finally got to pitch a story.

I had this friend who was studying hummingbirds in a lab.

So when I sat down with the editor, I said,

"I've got this great idea about hummingbirds,"

and she cut me off, and she said,

"Hummingbirds are boring because every picture of

a hummingbird that can be taken has already

been taken so do you have any other ideas?"

And I was like, uh...

I remember my friend telling me about these crazy parasites

that control the mind of their hosts.

There's a fungus that gets into an ant and makes it grab the end

of a leaf so the spores spread throughout the forest.

There's this worm that infects a cricket and

forces it to drown itself.

Their biology is as dramatic as any movie script

I have ever come across.

So I said, well, there's some parasites that take over

the minds of their hosts.

But, I have no idea what they look like,

I have no idea how I'm going to take pictures of them.

I'm just BS-ing my way through this meeting.

-The story came to me,

and they gave me his website, and I looked at his website,

and I was like,

"I don't see anything here."

It was not only his first magazine story for us,

it was his first magazine story, period.

I was like, "You know, I'll give this a shot,"

but I was skeptical that this would work.

[Anand Varma] I had just pitched an idea that

I did not know how to execute.

I got a lucky break, and I better not screw this up.

The biggest challenge for me was,

how do I make gross bugs look cool?

I thought about the way that David elevates the stature of

these little bugs by shooting them against

a white background.

[camera shutters]

[Todd James] The first picture Anand did

was exactly like David Liittschwager.

I said to Anand, we work with David Liittschwager,

we don't need you to be David Liittschwager,

we need you to find your own approach.

[Anand Varma] I suddenly needed to come up with

12 different ideas of

12 different parasites that were located all over the world.

Costa Rica, Brazil, Canada, Israel.

And I was working in a hotel room, in a lab,

in a research station trying to figure out the lighting.

And there were times when it was like,

take the camera off the tripod, take the flash off of the stand,

and just blindly shoot.

Just spray and pray.

None of it was working, and I took over 5,000 pictures.

I felt stuck.

It was completely, like, paralyzing.

I would have a conversation with myself,

saying nothing's working,

you're an idiot, how could you be doing this,

you should never have done this.

Why did you ever say yes to this?

-That's when we started thinking about

a different kind of approach, visual approach.

[Anand Varma] When you hear about these parasites,

they sound like they're coming out of a science fiction movie.

-We were talking about like, parasites taking over

people's bodies, like Alien's a great example.

And also just Film Noir.

[Anand Varma] So I went to the comic book store in Berkeley and

I kinda looked around at all the shelves and

I tried to think about,

how do I take a picture that looks like a graphic novel?

And I developed this lighting system that let me shoot a very

tight beam of light, kind of like a spotlight on a stage

but scaled way down.

[camera shutter]

[Todd James] He came up with the idea,

which was that he was going to do a consistent lighting scheme

on all of them where the host was going to be underlit and

there was going to be light on the parasite or

what represented the parasite.

I thought it was pretty great,

it felt like something completely different.

For some people, this story has a yuck factor.

But to somebody that sees like, the beauty and all of nature,

like Anand, it's like miraculous.

It's beautiful.

[Anand Varma] Midway through this project the editor-in-chief

told me if I took a good enough picture,

this would be a cover story.

[Todd James] Everybody wants the cover photo,

but the odds of that happening are just incredibly slim.

-And I'm waiting and I'm holding my breath and

the magazine story comes out.

And, in the end, they chose the ladybug.

I felt like there's no higher goal I could achieve

as a photographer.

But, it was a year or two ago,

and I got an email from somebody who said,

"I was inspired to study parasites because

I saw your story when I was a kid."

Amazing.

That's incredible to change the course of somebody's life

because you took a picture of a weird bug.

That's incredible.

This shed has been my workshop for the last nine years,

but we are getting a new space.

-What do you want to do with the high-speed hummingbird rail?

-Let's pull it down.

Take it.

Watch the gap.

This is going to be called Wonderlab.

And it's 3,000 square feet, it's 10 times as big as my old space.

This is all funded by a Polaris grant.

And there's so much we can do here,

teaching workshops to kids,

producing videos, having students come and

use the space to work on their own projects.

How to capture and share wonder, that's the, that's the goal.

[water hissing]

[beep]

We've got our six incubators plugged in,

we've got our temperature and humidity stabilized.

I'm feeling a lot more confident that

we can keep these embryos alive.

So what have we got here?

Wow, it's so active.

Look at that, how much it's moving, that's crazy.

Wow, they're looking great,

very healthy.

We have about six weeks to deliver this video

to the museum.

We're basically going to have to shoot multiple stages

of the chicks' development at the same time.

There's a diffuser in incubator 12.

[♪ orchestral music]

We're at the stage now where we're trying to solve

an aesthetic problem of how do we make this

look compelling, beautiful, interesting.

-Just holler if you need a hand. -Thanks.

[camera shutters]

-Oh, now this is already more interesting.

Woah, woah, woah, this is cool.

Hey guys, come check this out.

This is our standard lighting, correct?

-Yep.

-Woah. -Woah.

-Right? -All that is...

[Mark Unger] Fiber optics straight underneath.

-No, it's just like that.

[Mark Unger] What? Weird.

Wait but it makes the center so translucent.

The like actual embryo, that's weird.

[Anand Varma] Look at that, it's so much drama!

All right let's set up a red camera,

plop our egg in front of it, and start filming.

Oh wow. 48.

Ah, this is nice, this is nice.

Okay, you can just see the whole embryo, like,

pulse with every heartbeat.

Ohh check this out,

look you can actually see individual blood cells,

you see it?

Wow.

Like the blood's going out here and coming back here,

can you see it, Mark?

[Mark Unger] Oh, that's crazy.

-That's going out, and that's coming in.

-What?

-That's coming in.

-Look how much faster it goes than these ones,

like it's so slow here.

[Anand Varma] Yeah. Pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse.

Oh my God.

I think we've just started scratching the surface of

how we can capture that.

So this is now all of a sudden fun and exciting again.

And beautiful.

[buzzing]

After parasites,

National Geographic asked me to

do a story about the decline of honeybee populations.

I was like wow, they believe in me that they're ready to

give me another story.

But I was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, great, cool.

This will be no problem.

I'd done all the hard work of learning how to be

a photographer with parasites,

I got fiber optics, I got my backgrounds,

I got all these cool techniques.

And so, I got a beehive in the backyard.

I'd catch a bee and I'd put it in a dish and

I'd try to photograph it the way I'd photograph parasites.

[camera shutters]

But I was not taking very interesting pictures.

[camera shutters]

It's like the lighting, for the parasites it made sense.

But when I try to lift that approach and apply it

to honeybees, it didn't make sense.

So then I tried to photograph bees and

flowers, pollinating things.

[camera shutters]

And they're fine, but it doesn't make you think

differently about honeybees.

-He would send me texts that were like this long,

in the middle of the night, and with a picture.

And he would be like, I want to know what you think of this.

And then the rest of it would be like his own critique of it,

you know, that was as long as my arm.

[Anand Varma] It was so frustrating.

I hadn't yet realized that that's what photography

is always like.

It's a struggle to come up with a new,

fresh idea every time.

And it's hard, every time.

There's no formula.

So I decided to shake things up.

I had been reading about these experiments that scientists were

doing to try to understand the threats to honeybee health.

So I began traveling around the country to see them.

These experiments were fascinating.

At one of the labs, they were trying to figure out

how to breed mite-resistant bees.

So they were artificially inseminating them.

You know, there's these weird needles and a cone and

the bee's kind of covered up and I was trying to figure out

a good shot of the experiment.

And then I see the scientists setting up the equipment.

And as she's setting it up I see the frame.

Like I had been trying to photograph the instrument

by itself, but as soon as her hands are there,

it wasn't just a static object.

It became a story where there's an action happening,

a character doing something,

a subject that is experiencing something.

[Todd James] I looked at it and it was like opera.

Scene one, Act one, the bee is dead, what happened, right?

And it was like a bee opera.

He really took what he had done on the parasite story,

and it improved dramatically.

Technically, aesthetically, this was really taking that

to the next level.

[Anand Varma] I had this beehive at home,

and every so often you would glimpse like

the little larva inside, and it kind of dawned on me that

that little maggot-y looking thing that doesn't

look anything like a bee,

it somehow at some point it transforms.

And wouldn't it be so cool to make a time-lapse video

and watch that process happen.

By speeding up time, I could suddenly witness something that

I'd never been able to see before.

And that led me to what I'm doing now.

[Mark Unger] You should come take a look at this.

Something magical is happening here.

[Anand Varma] Wow.

[Mark Unger] There's something about the lighting here too

where this just like, it looks like...

[Anand Varma] We're starting to piece together

some shots for the museum.

I mean, you can imagine the audience gasping in that moment.

It's just so cool.

-It's so cool.

[Anand Varma] We've still got a lot left to do.

Logistical, technical, you know, photographic problems.

So I think what we have is, we have a Day 8,

we have a Day 10, and we have a Day 13.

Day 13 is incubator 1 that's currently fogged over.

-Okay.

-I'm inclined to try the scuba mask de-fogger.

So much of my job is this kind of, tinkering around

with wires and tape and glue and plastic and wood and screws.

We're having trouble soldering to a starboard LED,

do you have any advice on how to do that?

Oh, okay.

My brother Ravi is an industrial designer,

so sometimes I call him when I'm stumped.

All right, thanks Ravi, bye-bye.

[Mark Unger] All right, what's the expert advice?

-Change the tips.

I think tinkering with things probably runs in our family.

As I was growing up, we used to go to India

almost every other year.

Surrounded by coconut plantations,

rice fields you could explore,

there were chickens to run around and chase.

[laughter]

[honking]

I remember visiting a market in Hyderabad.

And there's a guy sitting on the street,

he's got two keys in his hands, looking at them.

He puts one down, he takes out a file and

starts filing the key, and then looks at them again,

files it some more.

And my brother Ravi turns to me and he's like,

this guy is copying keys.

And that was just one of these dozens of moments you see

the things that are crafted, you see the things that are built,

you see a scooter driving by with like eight chickens

strapped to the back of it, and you're like,

this is a place that knows how to solve problems.

To me, it was like India was this epitome of resourcefulness.

And I'm always kind of looking for you know,

what tools can I borrow, what can I fashion out of

the dumpster that can help me take these pictures?

Once I finished the honeybee story,

I went back to National Geographic and

I brought up that hummingbird idea again.

And this time, they said, "You know what,

we'd like to see how you approach hummingbirds."

We are in the lab of Chris Clark at UC Riverside,

and what we've got here is a cage that's recreating

an experiment and we're using this fancy,

top-of-the-line, high-speed camera to try to

film this hummingbird at 1,000 frames a second.

Hummingbirds are incredible creatures.

Their wings can beat over 150 times per second.

They can fly backwards as easily as they fly forwards.

There are hummingbirds that can fly

500 miles without stopping.

This is a bird that can outperform any human machine

ever built.

I was trying to figure out how to capture their movements,

I thought about Harold Edgerton.

He is one of my heroes.

He was an engineer who thought about photography

from an engineering lens, of like,

what tool do I need to build

to visualize this invisible phenomenon.

I learned from the way he used smoke to show

wind patterns and air.

[camera shutter]

He used high-speed cameras to slow down time.

He invented strobes,

and he developed the stroboscopic technique

that shows motion captured in multiple positions.

[camera shutters]

I had to build a lot of custom equipment,

a miniature fog machine,

an artificial rain machine.

Whoa!

[camera shutter]

I worked with a glass blower to fabricate a hummingbird

dinner plate to show how their tongues work.

I enjoy that kind of obsession and immersion.

You're cranking the music, you're just trying stuff and

your mind's making crazy connections.

And I continued experimenting and building

on everything I was learning.

[camera shutters]

I had this idea that I wanted to take a long exposure

of a bat in flight.

And so I thought I'll have a continuous light that shows

flightpath and a strobe that goes off

to freeze the bat in motion.

And the concept worked the first time.

[camera shutter]

And I just thought, "Wow, I finally know what I'm doing

as a photographer."

What is that?

It's been a pretty wild ride the last few days.

[sighing]

Two of the time-lapse cameras shut off unexpectedly.

So we lost two of the best time-lapses I had running.

Oh, there's a lot of junk on this glass.

[Mark Unger] Yeah.

[Anand Varma] Uh... What is that?

We only have three weeks left to deliver this video.

As soon as we solve one problem another one crops up.

I am about to start losing my mind,

in terms of deadline mode.

[Mark Unger] This is our fire danger system,

this is how we figure out how close we are to deadline

and Anand's mindset.

All the way up to the red like you see it now is extreme,

we're on deadline, don't ask any questions,

just hand me the tape.

-Oh man.

I had this idea using this specialty macro lens that would

let me get a view inside the egg as the chick is hatching.

What you see here is the chick has poked through

that internal shell membrane.

But the membrane is cloudy so you still can't see anything.

If this is the best shot we get of this,

I will not be happy.

So this is pretty interesting,

I mean this is a bit of a shot in the dark.

I'm wondering, we have this jug of clear mineral oil and

I'm doing a little bit of research here to see,

can we just drop a tiny layer of mineral oil over the embryo.

Interesting, I think this is not totally crazy.

They even used it for in vitro fertilization of human embryos,

so it should be totally safe.

Should have internal pip any time, any moment now.

Woah, look at that.

Look at the inside of that.

-Oh my goodness.

-Yeah.

-Woah, what? -That's incredible.

[Anand Varma] Turns out, drop mineral oil on the membrane

and you can see everything that's happening.

This is insane, oh my God.

This is so freaking cool.

[Mark Unger] Let's put it under the camera!

[Anand Varma] Let's just get it in there. This is crazy.

What?

I feel like I don't deserve this luck.

I mean it looks like it's shrink-wrapped.

[Mark Unger] Its head does look like someone vacuum-packed it.

[laughing]

[Anand Varma] Very pleased.

That's its first breath.

That's so cool.

I mean this to me is like the level of awesome that I'm after.

Like this, this checks the box for me.

One of my favorite parts of the photographic process is

all of the experimentation I get to do along the way.

You make discoveries, you solve problems,

and it's like, "Yeah, I feel great, this is awesome."

A frenzy of sort of hyperactive energy,

that uh, you crash from pretty hard afterwards.

After working on all these magazine stories back to back

without a break, I was starting to get burnt out.

I wanted to have the freedom to explore a project

on my own terms, where I didn't have the pressures of

deadlines and expectations.

I knew from my classes in biology that there's so much

craziness that a jellyfish does in the course of its life.

I thought, I can relive my dream of being a marine biologist.

So I set up my first tank and I remember filling up a bucket to

change the water and I splashed some water on the ground and

that just triggered this memory of all these times

in my childhood of doing water changes,

and sloshing water around, and making a mess that

brought me back to that time.

I was like, I forgot how much I love this.

It really did feel like Montessori school again.

You know, I have no editor,

I have nobody telling me what to do.

I can spend a day tinkering, learning.

[camera shutter]

So it starts with this tiny pinhole light right there,

it gets focused through this massive condenser lens

that shines on my subject, a comb jelly.

And what the setup allows me to see is all of those

tiny structures in its body, the cilia,

the muscle fibers, everything that would be

normally invisible to the naked eye.

Rather than publishing this for a magazine story,

I wanted to try something new with this work.

I wanted to share it in a physical space that's

completely immersing your senses.

So, I reached out to my friend Robert Krulwich,

who used to host the science podcast Radiolab,

and I asked him if he wanted to help me design an exhibit at

the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

We recorded this conversation together that

played in one of the theaters.

[Robert Krulwich] All right, Anand, this is, something.

What is this?

[Anand Varma] This is a close-up of a Moon Jellyfish.

-No it isn't. -Yeah!

[Robert Krulwich] No, it doesn't look like a jellyfish.

Anand has an eye for nature's secrets that I don't have,

you don't have, but he has.

[Anand Varma] What I wanted to show is how

a jellyfish grows up.

Because it's a surprisingly astounding

story of transformation.

[Robert Krulwich] And where did you find this?

Are you in the ocean shooting this?

Or where are you?

[Anand Varma] This is actually filmed all in

my garage in Berkeley.

[laughing]

[Robert Krulwich] Your garage in Berkeley?

[Anand Varma] For one of my shots,

I used some old microscope parts I bought from eBay,

and I attached motors to them so that I could send

the front of the lens through the glass of the aquarium.

So you're immersed into this world of tiny baby jellyfish.

[Robert Krulwich] And now it's doing something odd.

It seems to be growing automobile tires or something.

Like, what are those?

[Anand Varma] What you're seeing is all of these segments

transform into separate individual jellyfish.

[Robert Krulwich] Really? This is like cloning?

[Anand Varma] That's right.

Just like this.

[Robert Krulwich] Oh, oh, oh, look at that.

That orchestration of life is just mysterious and

extraordinarily beautiful.

He just makes you feel enchanted.

[Anand Varma] The most rewarding part for me personally is being

able to watch people experience the exhibit.

What are they curious about?

What are they most excited about?

What are they most surprised by?

One of the themes I keep returning to is this process

of metamorphosis, how does a larva become a being?

How does a polyp become a jellyfish?

How does an egg become a chicken?

It's as if I'm watching magic take place.

We are down to our last few shots.

We only have a couple of days left and

we're just kind of trying to sprint to the end here.

So today we're getting ready to have our first chicks hatch

from the eggs and so I'm hoping to be able to capture

those first moments on camera.

Here we go.

Oh God. There's chickens.

[cheeping]

[laughing]

What?

Uh, this is low-key a disaster actually because like this is

not really that useful for our filming purposes.

So there's one intact egg,

we can still set that up for filming,

try to catch the first chip.

[Mark Unger] All right, we gotta go quick.

-I think we've got a couple minutes,

I think we're all right.

-A couple minutes?

It's going to go the second you put that thing down.

-You're recording? -It's recording, yeah.

[Mark Unger] Oh look, look, look at that.

Oh my goodness.

Oh look at that crack.

[Anand Varma] That crack is really cool.

[Mark Unger] That's so awesome.

[Anand Varma] Oh wow, oh, I think we're gonna get it.

I'm gonna mess this up, aren't I?

[Mark Unger] I was gonna say this is eek.

-Must be perfect.

-You got it, you got it, just let it happen.

[Anand Varma] Oh wow, you can really get this shot.

Hold on.

This is cool to watch this happen in real time,

this is nuts.

Whoa...

Come on, come on, just like a freaking Grand Canyon here.

-Oh, oh, oh. -Oh, oh, oh.

[Mark Unger] Okay make sure that thing doesn't fall out the door.

[Anand Varma] He won't.

Oh wow.

[cheeping].

Get that on there.

I want that final shot, you know, lit with some hair light,

kind of fashion lighting, glamor shot.

Well, this is making me think I should actually frame it

wide enough to show its feet, like,

rather than just, oh God.

I wasn't expecting that to have a sound effect.

Ruin my black background here why don't you.

Hey, no that's not food.

[cheeping]

Let's take it to the sink.

Okay go, let go.

To me, my job is to figure out how to elevate these moments

that are in some ways very mundane.

Nudge to camera right.

Try to let it settle down again, yep.

I mean, how many billions of times does this happen

on our planet every year?

And yet, I don't think people appreciate how insane this is.

-Oh my gosh, that's so cute.

Oh wow.

Oh my God, what is this?

[Anand Varma] That's real time video of a day 8 chick.

-Oh, it's amazing.

[Anand Varma] You understand that every creature comes

from somewhere, and yet when you see it with your own eyes,

you can't help but feel a sense of magic.

It strikes you from time to time,

you're going about your day, you're just like, what?

None of this makes any sense.

How the heck are we even here?

It's just so cool to show somebody and watch their mind

being blown and watch their relationship

to that subject change.

-How can you see inside?

-Because you open a little hole in the egg

and you open it up.

I think it's helpful to stop and remember how crazy the world is.

It takes them three weeks to become a chicken.

Here we go. New chicken home.

See, you didn't get eaten.

This makes me so happy, this is the one place where I can

actually come visit them again, see them as full grown chickens,

see their eggs someday.

[farmer] Full circle.

[Anand Varma] I just want to kind of crack open that door

into the lives of these animals.

Gross, weird, unexpected creatures.

The things that we pass by unnoticed every day.

Hi everyone, welcome to Wonderlab.

This is our studio/workshop/classroom.

There is magic all around us.

There is beauty and complexity and wonder around every corner.

You just have to know how to look for it.

Oh, look at that!

Cool. Nice.

I want people to feel a sense of awe.

To kind of plant the seed that here is what's out there,

this is just one little secret

that the world has to share with us.

Just imagine how much more is out there if we learn to

slow down and pay attention

and see in a new way.

[♪ closing theme music]