Blending Ecology and Art: The Unexpected Path of Reilly Dibner

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Welcome to Winds of Change. I’m your host, Emy Di Grappa. Winds of Change is brought to you by Wyoming Humanities Council. We are doing a series of episodes focused on the entrepreneurs, innovators and creatives of Wyoming. My special guest today is Reilly Dibner.         

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Riley is an ecologist, voiceover actor and Animator with over 20 years of experience in scientific research in the US and internationally. She combines love of the natural world and visual arts in creating stop motion animations. She is a recipient of the Wyoming Humanities Council, an initiative of the inaugural Creative Economy Startup Challenge. This new initiative provides new opportunities for Wyoming creatives across the state, and we are eager to support them. Welcome, Riley.         

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Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Emmy. I’m really excited to be here and to talk with you. Oh, gosh. Well, it’s an honor to be talking to so many creatives across the state and just, you know, always makes my heart soar because I think Wyoming is such a special state and.         

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And I always am amazed at how many super smart creative people live here. Yeah, it’s been wonderful to meet so many people through this program. So let’s go back and let me ask you, where did you grow up and how did you come to Wyoming? Well, I’m originally from California and lived all over the US and before coming to Wyoming, I was living in Ireland. I’d been in Ireland for a number of years.         

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I studied frogs. Frogs and the bugs and came to Wyoming in 2010 for my PhD. Oh, okay, so you’ve been here since 2010? Yes. So, but your degree is in ecology?         

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My PhD is in ecology. Oh, your PhD. Okay. Wow. What were kinds of.         

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The kinds of research you were saying? Frogs. And what was the other one? Frogs and the bogs in Ireland. I studied frogs, the distribution and ecology of European common frog in peat bogs in western Ireland.         

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And I was there for four years and had just the most wonderful time. So what was your journey to Wyoming? Well, I had been interested in continuing research in ecology in a PhD and there was one specific professor that I’d been really interested in working with and he was here and our timing had been off. We’d sort of. He was moving here and then I went to Ireland and we’d been back and forth for a number of years and then finally it synced up and so I came here to work with him and moved into studying horned lizards, the Wyoming state reptile.         

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Okay. How did you grow into this love of. Of ecology with studying really small creatures? Actually, yeah, well, this. The creatures got actually quite a Lot smaller later on.         

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But I don’t know. I’ve always loved reptiles and amphibians. I grew up catching tadpoles and mucking around the pond and seeing what I could find and just being able to learn about their ecology, how how animals interact with each other, their living and non Latin and non-living world, their ecosystem. I don’t know, it’s always really appealed to me. And so that, that took me through a winding path to arrive here in Wyoming to study not ponds, but lizards and their ecosystems.         

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With that background and then your love of the natural world, how did you bring visual arts into it? And then start by creating stop motion animations. But in that answer I actually want you to talk about what is stop motion animation. Yeah, absolutely. First of all, stop motion animation is really old form.         

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It’s sort of an original form of making movies, of creating moving pictures. It’s. You take a photograph or, or think about a flip book. You have an image in one position and then say the next page in the flip book that that image is in another position and. And you string a bunch of these together, flip the pages and it.         

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And it moves. And that’s what, that’s what visual or that’s what stop motion animation is. Taking photographs as well. A lot of people are familiar with Claymation, like Wallace and gr. A piece of clay in one position and then you move it little bit by little bit and you take photographs in each new position.         

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And when you put all those images together, you can create basically this moving piece of art from still images. And that’s what stop motion is. And I work in hand painted, mostly hand painted, paper cut stop motion. So I have paper, pieces of paper that I cut out, I paint them and then I take images and string those images together. And so that’s what stop motion is.         

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And how I sort of approach, that’s part of how I approach it, how I got here. It’s not a straight journey exactly. It’s a series of little turns throughout my career and my research that have brought me right here. It seems like a really, circuitous, nonsensical path. From Master’s degrees and PhD and postdocs in ecology.         

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I studied microbes as a postdoc to being here. But all along the way, and I have absolutely no background or training in visual arts, none. Like I think I had maybe art class in sixth grade and that’s it. But it’s been a love of, of, I don’t know, a little bit of a hobby of creating images, but not at any. What I would have called any professional level, but I always loved creating presentations and telling the story of what I was studying or what my colleagues were studying and putting together the story of the science and the research.         

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It’s a fun mystery to investigate and sometimes solve little pieces. I don’t think we can ever solve all of the questions, but investigating questions and following the mystery. I love that thought process and the putting together the story and the creating the visual presentations to share with usually my colleagues, but sometimes it would be a public audience. And so I’ve always thought in pictures and images about what I’m studying and knew that there was something missing from what I was doing. I love the science research, absolutely loved it.         

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I’ve worked with amazing people and on some incredible projects, but I always felt like there was a little something missing for me. And through a series of events, I ended up deciding to just give it a go full time in creating these films, these stories about science, about the natural world, maybe not about research, but about communicating some aspect of the natural world in a way that is fun and easy to connect with. And so that’s how I ended up right here. Well, so interesting because just that you have a love for science and you have a love for the visual arts and you were able to bring these two things together. So talk to me about the work you’re doing for this program.         

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What do you envision it doing? How do you, how are you embarking on this journey? Yeah, so my mission, so the company that I’ve created is Ecosystem Films and I’m a creative production studio. At the moment it’s very small creative production studio specializing in stop motion animations about science and the natural world. Whether it’s 15 seconds or, you know, 10 minutes.         

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My mission is to extend the reach of appreciation for science and the natural world world through rich audio-visual experiences that are entertaining and can be powerful vehicles for learning, for self-education or for teaching. Are you developing lots of connections and partnerships through this? Through this journey? I am, yeah, I have. So I’m always interested in serving my science colleagues and helping them to find new ways to communicate what they’re working on.         

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I’m also interested in helping my filmmaker friends who maybe work in live action, but want to communicate a piece or show, visualize a piece that’s really hard to capture in live action, something you can’t film in the real world. And I’m interested in providing those and hopefully we’ll be providing that on an upcoming project about something that is best expressed through basically scientific illustration and that’s one of the powers of, of stop motion animation. Animation in general. I love digital animation. I just don’t do it.         

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And scientific illustration is you can zero in on things that are harder to highlight in the real world. They may be part of an image, but it’s harder to zero in on them. For example, I can’t get my lizards to stand still in the same way I want them to in the field to be able to show something about them. But I can do that in an image, so in a painted image. So that’s part of it.         

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I’m also keen to work with brands, organizations, agencies that want to communicate something that aligns with my values and visions. You know, I think it’s so interesting that you’re a scientist and a visual artist and, you know, you’re, you’re crossing this bridge to make it, you know, I guess a business, you know, where you’re working on a business and it probably creates lots of different challenges and you probably learn. I think I’ve learned that through podcasting is I learn what I don’t know, right? You learn what you’re really good at and what you really need help on. So I love what you said, that you can’t get your lizards to take commands and stand in position when you’re trying to.         

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But so you’ve been, you’ve been an artist going on this journey. Is that self taught? Oh, 100%. I have a. I come from a family of actually scientists and artists, but I feel like of the bunch, I had the least training.         

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I definitely had least training. And I’m pretty sure I have the least amount of skill in really all of those things. So I’m kind of a. No. I feel like I’m a novice at everything I do.         

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But that’s helpful. Beginner’s mind for whatever I approach is helpful. It’s like, well, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m making this up as I go. Now the science training is helpful that I don’t want to be making up as I go.         

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That’s helpful to learn from experts, but I feel like there’s some freedom in not knowing how. Not knowing how to draw something correctly or not knowing how to make an image. That’s right. Because all of this stuff is just showed up in my head and I’m trying to put it out on paper and then in film, but really every step I take, the more I learn, the less I know, which is exciting. I mean, it’s terrifying in many ways, but it’s really exciting.         

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And there are so many technical aspects of creating stop motion that I never knew existed. All sorts of software I’m learning that’s not for creating digital image, digital art or digital animations, but to help guide the stop motion process, to help make that a little smoother. That’s kind of hard to learn, but fun at the same time. Learning how to use my camera better to take the photographs of the images I’m creating and the painting I’m hugely inspired by, actually colleagues of mine. A friend of mine, Karen Vaughn, she created the Art of Soil.         

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It’s an incredible arts business, creating soil based paints, watercolors. And she’s a soil scientist by training and professor. And her journey has been very inspiring. And I use her paints, they’re locally made here in Laramie. And I use her paints in most of my paintings so far.         

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That is a great inspiration. So how did you land on stop motion animation to. Were there other venues you could have taken, other avenues you could have taken? Or did that one just fit so well in your project and what you were hoping to create and then have an end product? That’s a great question, Emmy.         

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It really. I felt like I never really had a choice because it just showed up in my brain and that was the way to go. And I went for a run with a friend a couple of years ago and I said, and she’s a scientist, she’s a geologist. And I said, I’ve been having these ideas about creating stop motion animations to tell science stories. Am I insane?         

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And so we talked about it and she said, yeah, you’re insane and it’s a great idea, we should do this. And so I just kind of pursued that direction without thinking, without really considering any other options. And I had through another series of random events and doing voiceover of recorded science presentations. I’d fell in love with voiceover, largely realizing that I hated the way I sounded and I wanted to improve the sound quality. Not from anyone saying, oh, you have a great voice, because you don’t have to have a great voice, quote unquote, to do voiceover.         

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But just, it was fun. So I’d been doing voiceover and I said, well, I could put voiceover visual image, I could put voiceover paintings and to tell these stories. And then it just automatically, I automatically felt like, well, obviously the pictures, the paintings, they have to move at least sometimes. And that’s where it was born. I didn’t actually think about it that much.         

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It just showed up as this path forward. And I felt like I Had no real choice other than just to take steps down that path and see where it led. So let’s talk about voiceover, because that’s really interesting. So just explaining voiceover, is it you showing the image and then you’re describing or you’re telling a story? As you’re going through this, the images are changing, but throughout it, you’re scripting a story.         

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Really scripting a story? Yes. Okay, so that’s the voiceover. Well, so, yes, I also do commercial and character voiceover as like, as another. That’s sort of where I’ve been running as a business.         

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And I felt like, well, obviously I need to tell science stories. And so the first thing I do, the process for creating these is for whoever wants to make a piece, if it’s 15 seconds or longer or whatever, they may not want voiceover. It may be a visual journey with music. It may be something to just show something about part of a message. There may not be narrative voiceover.         

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There may be a little bit of music and an image, you know, or a movie. Right, A stop motion movie, but for longer pieces. And I’m creating a, basically a demo film at the moment about horned lizards in the red desert. And for that, the very first thing is to, you know, this is, this is my brainchild. So I’m the one meeting with me and creating the script.         

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I create the story. It’s basically a story. It has a narrative arc or it’s about a topic. And then I do all the things you do for film. I storyboard and then I collect the images and then I put them together and I actually record the voiceover last.         

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So there’s room for change in script all the way up to the end. And that’s how I’ll work with scientists or companies or agencies. I’ll meet with them, get their idea and create a script with often with their input that they’ll approve. And then I’ll step through the process in the same way so that we arrive at something that has the right story and all of the visual components to tell the story and then the voiceover to go with it, if that’s something that is appropriate for the project. That is really interesting because now I went down another road with you.         

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So you’re, you’re a scientist, a visual artist, and now I hear you saying you’re also a voiceover artist. How did you end up doing, doing that as a, as a job? That was actually the first thing that made me realize that maybe there was something outside of academia or research science where I could contribute where I can contribute in some way. And it was just a spark. It was creating these.         

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I had to create, I think it was during 2020 because I had to create online presentations for a variety of meetings and National Science Review and a variety of things. And we had to record as a. I was a postdoc at the time, after my PhD and I had to record like a three minute piece with, you know, you give a presentation. I had to record that over my slides. And so I put it together and I listened back and it just like it hurt my brain thought they said this sounds horrible.         

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And it was really. It wasn’t just my voice, but it was the sound quality. It was so bad because it’s just, you know, recording on, over on Zoom, probably in my living room. And I went down rabbit holes trying to make the sound better so that the presentation would be better and just stumbled on this world. And I just kind of investigated a little bit of time here and there over the next couple years and then started working with a coach, first through group coaching and then an individual coach to do voiceover and created a couple demos, have a couple of agents now and they send me auditions and I send out the auditions and cross my fingers and love that.         

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It’s really fun. But I wanted to tell. I wanted the science to be piece of that. And unless you randomly end up with a script for a science museum or something, this. This felt like a, I don’t know, a different, a different direction that was more complete and an overall fit for me creating the stop motion animations.         

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So I stepped in that direction. Yeah, sounds like you’ve kind of put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Trying to. Yeah, you’re trying to. Sounds like you’re being very successful doing it.         

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So when you create your storyboard, is it a physical storyboard or is it something you’re doing on your computer? I like a physical storyboard because it’s actually way easier for me at first. And then, I mean, I’ll have the script and I will actually have some stuff laid out on my computer. But the images themselves, I like to sketch them out. And so if I have a storyboard on my computer, which I do, what I end up doing usually is adding the images or the sketches that I’ve taken, like pictures.         

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I add them into the document later because I’ll do all the scripting online and lay out the storyboard online and then I’ll print it out and sketch things out by hand because I’m able to get a much Clearer picture that way. I want it to be my hand drawings rather than anything I’ve pulled from photographs. I’ll use my photographs as inspiration, but I don’t. I don’t really want to murky the. Make the process murky or confuse my process by putting images in a storyboard that I haven’t created.         

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Let me go back a minute because I’m thinking that you’re out in the field and let’s say, what was the little lizard that. In the Red desert? The red horned. The horned lizards. It’s the greater short horned lizard.         

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It’s Wyoming state reptile. Okay. The greater. Say it again. The greater short horned lizard.         

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I’m gonna look it up. Okay. People call them horn toads or horny toads. Oh, okay. It’s the same thing.         

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There is a horned toad, but we don’t have those in this country. People call them horny toads. I think they’re also. It’s a different species, but TCU’s mascot is the horned toads or the horned frog. It’s.         

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It’s horned lizards, and they’re throughout. Throughout the West. We have one in Wyoming, and it’s the greater shorthorned lizards, but. Yeah, horned lizards. Oh, my gosh.         

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Well, my family had a cabin in southern Colorado, and we spent hours of every day collecting little horny toads. Yes. Yes. Because they’re so fun. They’re so cute.         

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They’re so cute. Yeah. And my dad actually made us let him go because we were packing up the car to go home, and I came from a big Hispanic family, and, you know, all the kids decided they were going to make their collection of horny toads. So we, like, had so many in the car. I think we were freaking my mom out.         

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She’s like, ernie, make the kids get rid of the horny toads. We thought we were going to take them home and make pets, you know? Yeah, I know. It’s so. It’s so enticing because they’re so cute and they’re so docile as little creatures.         

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You probably might. Your mom probably made the right call. They don’t do well in captivity. Some people have figured it out, but they eat. They’re ant eating specialists, so.         

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And some of them are very particular about which ants. Not all of them, but they’re adorable. But not. Not necessarily easy to keep alive. Yeah.         

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No. Unless they’re in the desert, in which case they’re out there now. They’re fine. Yeah. Well, in southern Colorado, it is the desert.         

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But, yeah, we. We did make the Right decision. And we, we did so many crazy things like that. Yeah, we would build ant farms. You know, kids do the kids, kids do wild things, which is so fun.         

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And then you get older and you’re like get freaked out if there’s an ant in your house or a spider. Right. And I’m definitely against flies. I don’t know why God decided to make flies, but they’re food. They’re food for the honey to feed the spiders.         

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Oh, I. Exactly. There you go. Yeah, there you go. So you’re out in the field.         

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So do you actually go on location and have to take photographs or how do you get information for this research? That’s a great question. So I’m figuring this out and I’m learning some new techniques. I’m learning some new techniques and for some things I am going to have to go on location. I’m going to get to go on location.         

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This is a huge treat because I love doing fieldwork. I loved doing fieldwork for my PhD for my master’s project and I’ve missed that part. So I’m. For example, I have a little snippet of a horned lizard up on my web page and I’ve just migrated it to my new Instagram. I have like a professional Instagram account that I just created.         

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I realized I should probably migrate stuff from my personal account. I have this, this lovely sequence of a horned lizard and it is derived from video footage that actually I think my husband collected in like 2014 when he came to visit one of my field sites. He create, he makes film and he was interested in helping me to make a little documentary about these lizards. Never did it in live action, at least not in any kind of scale, any kind of broader scale beyond, you know, a couple snippets here and there. But we have this footage of horned lizard walking around on the ground and I’ve taken that and I basically took screenshots and then in a drawing program traced the lizard and then exported all of these silhouettes and cut them out.         

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And I have a stack of like 30 something pieces of cut out lizard in different positions that I then painted. And then use photographs to take each one and stack them together. And I have this sequence of a lizard moving a lizard walking. And having that footage on site was just incredible to use this particular format of creating stop motion. Now I’ve also messed around and you can see this on my webpage as well.         

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It’s just a still of a horned lizard and I’ve moved the legs, I’ve like created Little legs that move and it’s cute and quirky and I love it and it does the job. It’s not my. I’m not most proud of that lizard painting, but it’s really fun. And so there’s many different ways to do this. And from that I didn’t have to go anywhere.         

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I know how they move. The movement is wrong in the video, but it’s okay. As a start, I was basically testing techniques. But for some things I don’t need to do any fieldwork. I have all of that research that I can pull from all sorts of various sources to understand how something works.         

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But if it’s an animal movement, there are a couple ways to approach that. One thing is to collect field images. There’s a. There’s some digital. There’s some public domain material, but not much in terms of animal movement.         

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And that stuff is old enough that it’d be hard enough to get high enough quality. I’m curious about playing with AI to create very rough animal silhouette movement. I have not had success yet. Everything I’ve created looks horrible. So there’s no chance of this being replaced with AI.         

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But it’s potentially a useful tool if I can find something that can say like I want to create an. Create a film about fish in Yellowstone, in Yellowstone Lake. You know, I don’t have any film footage of fish in Yellowstone Lake. And I could either buy licensed video if it exists in the way that works for me, or I can play around with other fish images that I can create myself and a tailor to tell the right story. So some field work.         

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Absolutely. Some playing around with AI to see if I can capture the right kind of animal movement. And then because I don’t do any digital animation, it’s all derivative. It’s just then be screenshots of that movement that I then cut out and paint and. Yeah, testing, yeah, testing, testing everything, which you’re good at.         

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You’re a scientist, so you’re always looking for what is the test? What is the test we’re doing here. So has that been interesting? Being married to a filmmaker? He would actually.         

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It has been. I think he’d predominantly describe himself as a writer. That’s where he finds that he excels. So he’s. He’s predominantly a writer, but he has done a lot of film.         

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So it is really interesting talking to him about some things that I’m interested in in terms of technique and camera. Like, I don’t. I mean, I’m sort of a point and shoot. Like, let’s put on the automatic. The automatic everything, which doesn’t work anymore for me.         

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I can’t do that for studio work. So I’m learning a lot about my camera and some tricks that he’s picked up. But what’s also funny is we approach storytelling and filmmaking from very different ways. And so things that work for him don’t necessarily work for me, or maybe they would work, but they don’t feel right. So it’s interesting.         

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It’s fun to be able to talk about that and, yeah, to have somebody who knows that world a little bit, but I’m in a completely different space, so it’s almost. Almost irrelevant. Except that there are some technical things that he’s teaching me and some that I’m teaching him now, too. Oh, wow. That’s cool.         

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You’ve mentioned a couple times your website, so I definitely want to tell the audience of how all the ways that they can find out about you. Sure. Well, so ecosystemfilms.com is my. Is the Ecosystem Films webpage. It is under construction.         

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I have an absolutely phenomenal web designer who is working on updating my page. She’s brilliant and I’m thrilled to be working with her. Her name’s Amanda Jeffers and she’s fixing it. So it doesn’t look amazing right now, but the material is there. And then also through my Instagram account, it’s Ecosystem Films on Instagram.         

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And then if you’re interested in the voiceover, which is definitely related, but also goes, there’s a separate piece that’s rileydibnar.com and that’s. You don’t see anything about Ecosystem Films on that. But I. I need to make a little note on there to say if you’re looking for Ecosystem Films, you can go. Go here.         

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But those are. Those are the primary places. Okay, that’s wonderful. Now people know where to find you and can follow you, follow your journey, which is very cool. Thank you so much for talking to me today.         

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And I really look forward to keeping in touch and seeing what you create, what the end result is, what is your final product. Thanks so much, Emmy. It’s been great talking with you.         

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Thank you for listening. I’m executive producer Emmy Di Grappa. Winds of Change is brought to you by Wyoming Humanities Council, our co hosts and all the people who generously share their stories and their time. For more information, go to thinkwy.org subscribe and never miss a show.         

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