This summer I worked on a really interesting project that was something pretty new to me: an animated explainer about the current situation of the endangered Sumatran Rhinoceros, created for the international environmental news site Mongabay.

Mongabay does some of the world’s best environmental reporting, and they cover a truly global slate of issues. Like many journalistic enterprises, they often experience an ongoing need for ways to summarize certain introductory aspects of an issue, so that their readership will understand it more fully. One such issue is the fate of the Sumatran rhinoceros, a critically endangered species found in forests in Indonesia.

I worked with a team at Mongabay to storyboard and illustrate a script that outlines how the rhinos ended up in the unfortunate situation they find themselves in, and then the illustrations, which I rendered as multiple separate layers so the animators could manipulate them, were brought to life.

The resulting video is the first in a series of explainers of this sort that I’m going to be producing with Mongabay ever the next few months. Keep an eye out for the next one, which deals with the much more difficult subject of selecting animals for a captive breeding project from wild populations that may number as low as 80.