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Tomáš Profant (left) and Petr Hájek – creators of Bachelor’s Kočkopes. | Author: Iveta HovorkováTomáš Profant adores Walt Disney and draws beautifully. Petr Hájek loves music, composes, and plays in a band. Yet neither makes a living from these passions. They work as lecturers and researchers at the Institute of Solid Mechanics, Mechatronics and Biomechanics at FME. Alongside their jobs and hobbies, they’ve now taken on their own project – short animated videos about mathematics.
“We both work with students and see how their education at a technical university stands or falls with their knowledge of mathematics. Often, math is too abstract for them, but in mechanics, we have the opportunity to show it in context. That’s how the idea arose to present some topics to students in a digestible format – through videos on social media,” explains co-creator Tomáš Profant.Marketing cookies must be enabled to play the video. You may change the setting here. You can open the video in a new panel.
“Tomáš draws nicely, so he came up with the idea of creating a sort of visual math textbook. But we realized videos would be a much more accessible format for today’s students. We don’t aspire to write textbooks – rather, short stories just a few seconds long that explain a concept or phenomenon in a clear and digestible way. There will be a few equations, images, and music. We think it could work,” adds Petr Hájek.
Tomáš Profant already has experience with textbooks – or more precisely, with illustrating them. He’s also created a comic and a drawn exhibition about physicist Richard Feynman for the Technical Museum in Brno. Now he’s bringing to life illustrations of a small bachelor, his cat, and his dog.Marketing cookies must be enabled to play the video. You may change the setting here. You can open the video in a new panel.
“We want to be mediators, giving mathematical expressions meaning through mechanics. We’re only taking a tiny part of mathematics – one we can interpret geometrically and practically. The main goal is to capture interest; from there, there’s plenty of literature where one can study the topic further,” says Profant.
Not even the fact that this is an entirely unfamiliar creative process for them – one full of mistakes and technical issues – has slowed them down. “It turns out that even a few seconds of video is a very time-consuming process. And we’re choosing the simplest animation path,” confirms Profant. “We don’t know how to make videos, we don’t know how to record music, we don’t know how to put it all together. So it’s quite a challenge,” Hájek agrees with a smile.Marketing cookies must be enabled to play the video. You may change the setting here. You can open the video in a new panel.
Petr Hájek has found his niche in sound. He creates music for the videos, but also sound effects that breathe life into the drawn characters. “I’m constantly searching for what sounds good. I locked myself in the band’s rehearsal room or in my room and experimented with recording various sounds. For instance, we needed the sound of writing with a pencil on paper – but when you record that, it doesn’t sound right at all! In the end, the best sound was dragging an empty wasp nest across the paper. The sound of blinking? I tap a metal teacup with my fingernail. Or we use the sound of an anthill. So I record weird sounds – some with my mouth, some with a guitar,” describes Hájek.
The first videos are already out, and more are in the works. “One day we’d like to publish a little book too, but that’s a matter for the future. When something is a long haul, I’ve found it best to go step by step – that’s how big things can be achieved,” says Profant, who admits the project is a way of repaying a debt to his own talent. “I’ve always been good at drawing. Even my friends told me it’s a shame I’m not more into it, that I have talent. But I never wanted to be a professional artist. I’ve always been obsessed with math and mechanics. I’m kind of a split personality, so I’d like to repay the gift of being able to draw nicely,” concludes Profant.
Responsibility: Bc. Tereza Kučerová