Future Quest: Elizabeth Cox Discusses Her Fascinating New TED-Ed Show, ‘Ada’

The upcoming five-episode animated series Ada follows a young girl who juggles her life as a library assistant and her imaginary world as she explores how various transformative technologies could shape our future. Written and directed by Elizabeth Cox, founder of the indie production company Should We Studio, the series will premiere on TED-Ed’s YouTube channel on January 28. We had a chance to chat with Cox, who was also the senior editorial producer at TED-Ed, where she produced over 200 animated shorts, about her award-winning new project:

Animation Magazine: Congrats on your wonderful, insightful new show: Can you tell us a bit about the origins and inspirations for Ada?

Elizabeth Cox: Ada juggles two worlds she can’t really keep separate. The first is her daily reality, where the urgency she feels about the pressing problems facing humanity is completely at odds with her mundane responsibilities as a library assistant. The other is her imagination, where she obsessively explores how different transformative technologies could shape life in the future, dragging people from real life along for the ride — her boss, her grandmother, or an unsuspecting visitor to the library. Two distinct visual styles represent Ada’s reality and her imagination, and in each episode the imagined future has thematically distinct color palettes, textures, and shape design.

Everyone has a stake in the technologies that will shape the future, but too often futurist discourse is exclusionary and off-putting, amplifying the voices of a few and discouraging the majority of people who could make the future better. I wanted to offer an alternative to the steel-and-laser-gun futures that dominate science fiction and the imaginations of today’s tech leaders, instead providing lush natural environments and more diverse characters interrogating the defining technologies of our time.

When did you actually start working on it and how long did it take to make?

We were in production for 14 months starting in November 2022, but I started working on it in early 2022 and hired a smaller subset of the team to work with me on researching and deciding topics as well as working to nail down the look and feel and the pipeline we would use to achieve it.

Where was the animation produced and which tools were used to create the animation?

The studio is remote, and we had collaborators working from all over the world. The backgrounds were painted in Photoshop. Characters and props were modeled and animated in Maya, then received a flat render. With the exception of a few moments in the imagined world, we didn’t render lighting from 3D, instead we used 2D rim lights and the background paintings themselves. We also rendered a stroke pass for the characters using V-Ray. We did compositing in After Effects, and had some 2D effects animation in the environments (e.g. the volcano erupting in Episode 2).

How many people worked on it with you?

We had a core team of 12 working on it throughout the production, and a wider cast & crew of approximately 40 people.

Can you talk about the overall look of the show?

The goal of appealing to audiences other than sci-fi fans — essentially, creating science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction — informed a lot of the creative decision making. I wanted Ada, and in particular the future worlds of Ada’s imagination, to have a lush, handmade, human feel. For example, the few visible representations of artificial wombs have been dystopian, so instead, the direction I gave for that episode of Ada was that the womb center should look like somewhere you’d feel good about dropping your child off for daycare.

For the real world (Ada’s daily reality in the library where she works), we went with a painterly rendering, characters with relatively realistic proportions and a naturalistic color palette, perspective and acting for the characters. In the imagined world, we set high-level guidelines for the art direction, parameters within which we changed up the look and feel to match each episode’s topic. The characters and environments would have exaggerated shapes and proportions and unrealistic perspective, more cartoonish acting and a more restricted, vibrant palette.

Can you tell us about your visual references?

We looked at countless visual references, but here were a few:

• Cartoon Saloon films like Wolfwalkers and Song of the Sea for their richly illustrated mythological worlds
• Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack concept art for its bold design and unusual retro-futuristic portrayals
• The 2013 feature Boy and the World for its ingenious and vibrant playfulness
• Recent works like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Dragon Prince and Arcane as examples of how to use a 3D pipeline to create unusual-looking artistic worlds

From the beginning, I knew the series would be very much driven by Ada’s voice, so finding that voice was important. The vibe is sort of like The Magic School Bus for an older audience — narrative and educational at the same time, with a wacky, hopefully charismatic protagonist. Tonally, I wanted it to be conversational rather than didactic–more like friends having an impassioned debate over drinks than a philosophy lecture.

What do you love best about the final product?

I’m very proud of what we were able to achieve aesthetically with our budget. The artistry was a priority for me and everyone on the team, and I think Ada punches above its weight in that way.

As the writer, it’s been gratifying to see audiences have seemed to really connect with Ada as a character, which is exciting. I also love a lot of the secondary characters — the grumpy librarian who appears in every episode as well as those who feature in a single episode. I based the character of Ada’s wacky grandma on my own grandmother, and it’s been gratifying to see how familiar and funny that relationship is for lots of people from different cultural backgrounds when it was based on something so specific and personal.

As for the topics, they’re all important and under-discussed, but I’m most proud of how we covered artificial wombs. Of course, the moment I finish something, I’m already thinking about all the ways I’ll make the next thing even better.

What would you say were your biggest challenges?

For me personally, the biggest challenge was balancing creative work and running a business. These two types of work have different and incompatible needs–creative work often requires blocks of interrupted time, while fundraising/managing/other aspects of leadership require responsiveness.

The biggest challenge we faced during production was that we completely changed the pipeline — and corresponding art direction, character designs, etc., after Episode 1. We started out thinking we would use 3D character animation in the real world and draw 2D animation in the imagined world, but during the first episode, it became clear that even with many creative time-saving solutions, the 2D animation was too slow and too expensive.

So we decided to switch to a 3D pipeline for both worlds for subsequent episodes, which was nerve wracking because we had to do it without breaking stride on production or falling further behind schedule, but by Episode 3, we were back on track and actually came in a little under our projected spend on Episode 3 — and best of all, I think the final product is stronger as a result of the change.

Are there any future plans for Ada?

We licensed the existing episodes of Ada to TED-Ed, and they’ll be available for free on their YouTube channel shortly. We’ll continue posting updates on in-person screenings and any future distribution on shouldwestudio.com/ada

I’d love to make more and longer episodes of Ada in the future–there are a lot more topics I’m interested in exploring in this format.

What do you hope audiences will take away from it?

In addition to bringing the topics of the episodes into the public consciousness, there are a few broader ideas I hope viewers take away from the series as a whole. First, the series makes the case that we should invest in the ethical, legal, and social structures to support transformative technologies in parallel and in proportion to our investment in building the technologies themselves. Through Ada, we also hope to model an exuberant, open-hearted spirit of inquiry: a willingness to engage with weird or off-putting questions and be open to surprising answers.

Ada eps. 1-5 will be available to watch on the TED-Ed YouTube channel starting January 28. Watch the trailer and learn more at shouldwestudio.com/ada.