…kind of. They’re at least starring in roles to promote it!
As part of the bid to host the building of the International Linear Collider (ILC) in Western Japan Team Lab Tokyo created a humorous and light-hearted interpretation of the collision between electrons and positrons in the form of high school girls in this short film.
Featuring students from Waseda High School in Saga and Shota Morita, the star of the popular iPhone quick draw system video (pictured below) on YouTube as their teacher the film demonstrates the friendship between two high school students, ‘Electron’ and ‘Positron’ cut together in the style of a theatrical trailer. All this to explain the mechanics of what will be a major research institution for particle physics.
Team Lab combined the live action footage with animation and special effects, as well as an original “ILC” song to heighten the sense of speed that builds up to collision of the two ‘particles’.
To increase public participation in the campaign, all of the materials from the video are open to anyone to use and remix as the entire piece has been cut into many 3-second .gif clips that can be remixed. Those can be found on the ILC tumblr which is, to say the least, a massive hub of information overload.
The Planned Project
According to Nature, the ILC is planned to consist of a long track of superconducting cavities stretching across 31 km in which particles can accelerate to energies of up to 500 gigaelectronvolts before colliding. The video bellow provides more details:
However this project is predicted to cost more than $8 billion and therefore has failed to get strong support from governments worldwide and even funding for the initial design and research stages has already been cut back. Japan on the other hand is eager to host a world-class international science project, and this video is part of showing that enthusiasm on the part of local governments (with plenty of Abenomics money to burn it seems).
A large part of this bid is to enhance Japan’s role in the international scientific community and in particular Fukuoka and Saga prefectures in Kyushu (the locations of the proposed site) would like to be the hub of this global project. Either way, we’re at least being entertained in the process of this massive bid.
