TECHNOLOGY
Inventing The Weather
If you read the December issue of Wired or some of the other hipper journals
in America, you might have noticed that I recently released – just in
time for the holidays – something called “The Year in Weather”.
The Year in Weather is a DVD and CD-ROM product that gives you time-lapse satellite/radar imagery of world weather patterns from November 2002 through October 2003. Taken from 11 different viewpoints” with accompanying original music, a year in weather, in short, can now be seen in about 8 minutes with soothing tunes that will help you digest the surreal movie-like effect.
I can see your face now as you say to yourself ‘what is he talking about?’ As I started to do market research for The Year In Weather, I described the product to anyone who would listen and ask if they were interested without actually showing them any images. One in ten people might feign mild interest. The rest would continue to look at me with that bewildered look. Then I would show the product to them and 5 or 6 people would get a gleam in their eye. So, without confusing you further, I suggest visiting www.theyearinweather.com to view a sample.
Many people have asked me what inspired, or more aptly, what possessed me, to come up with this. It all stemmed from watching images of Hurricane Mitch back in 1998. The television coverage showed the satellite imagery of the hurricane spinning, inching its way toward land every day as it approached. The animations were roughly 4 seconds in length and then the images would just snap back and repeat.
I really wanted to see the animations play for a much longer period of time so I could watch the entire life of the hurricane. I started to think about the idea of taking the animations and linking them together to create movies. Then I started to imagine different viewpoints. The product would go beyond the practical applications of weather forecasting and predicting, and into the aesthetic infotainment arena. The idea of making hurricanes into infotainment was a little disconcerting though so I sat on the idea for 5 years. In other words I was too lazy and/or busy to do anything about it.
My wife and I had twins in March of 2002 and after they were born something inspired me to act on the idea. The thought that I might actually make money to feed them might have had something to do with it.
On a whim, I contacted AccuWeather. Immediately, they thought it was a great idea. A joint agreement was drafted and we were off and downloading images.
It seemed like a simple enough idea: I would download the images from an FTP site that AccuWeather set up for the project. The data alone equaled about 40MB of disk space a day. The plan was to take the images, transfer them to a Media 100, and, because they were date stamped, the computer would automatically order them correctly. Voila! Out would spit a seemless animation. Ultimately, we would wind up manipulating over 160GB of data into 72 minutes of useable material.
We originally intended to use AccuWeather’s date stamps as the official timekeeper onscreen. It turned out that they were actually too small to read clearly. So we had to create a legible date stamp to apply to each day. But, because we had to cut out certain frames, the time stretch didn’t work quite as well as we hoped and the visuals were off by as much as 36 hours.
In the end, getting the pictures right was a logistical battle, but the fun came when we started creating weather mood music.
Pete Schmidt from Comma Music took on the task of composing music to the images. This was by far the most creative part of the whole process and the most fun. Deciding what sounds to associate with hurricanes, storms and different regions was a real artistic journey. Adding music brought the product from amusing eye candy to a full experience.
In the end the whole thing came together and - from last download on October 31st to first shipment – the production time was only a week.
Creating The Year in Weather has been a rewarding experience. There are so many ideas for personal projects that I have had over the years that never came to fruition. And for those of us in this industry who are getting paid to develop other people’s projects, creating a product that is purely your idea is a luxury. The rewards can’t be measured in dollars.
On the other hand I do have those twins…