Aardman has created a psychedelic animated video to accompany Hawking’s 2016 BBC Reith Lectures.

Every year, the BBC produces a lecture series, the Reith Lectures, given by a leading figure and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service.

This year’s Reith Lectures are by Stephen Hawking and to accompany them the BBC commissioned Aardman to make an animated film.

“Inside his Head is a visual kaleidoscope celebrating Hawking’s journey, brought to life with stylised imagery and scientific diagrams to create an engaging film created to accompany the renowned scientist’s lecture about the theory of black holes, Hawking Radiation and thermodynamics. The idea behind the animation was to create a very short video that travels inside the professor’s head and explores his early interest physics and would hopefully inspire the audience the same way,” Aardman stated.

Aardman director, Will Studd, added, “I wanted to create a stylised version of the graphics I grew up with in the ’80s. I loved the kitsch futurism of the BBC’s TV version of Hitchhikers Guide graphics, or the weird spacey covers of Omni magazine; I wanted to bring a bit of this back to explore Stephen’s thoughts. For both films, we built a soundtrack using ’70s/’80s synthesisers to try and capture a sense of that retro futuristic feeling.”

The animation, developed with the assistance of the European Space Agency and NASA, features the voices of Carl Sagan, Professor Brian Cox, Professor Stephen Hawking and US theoretical physicist, Andrew Strominger. Its original music is by Max Halstead.

The first lecture on black holes, is on the BBC’s site, accompanied by another film by Aardman “that promises to explain Black Holes in less than two minutes.”