RojoFern

Here's five minutes of movie cover b-roll

Naturally with accompanying midwestern bird ambience

speculative video length

Yeah, this is getting nuts and deserves it's own post.

What you're looking at is a simple chart comparing how many words I speak in each of the video essays. TM-TM is in blue, and currently sits in second place. It is not finished. Within the next couple weeks, it's likely to become the longest script I've written. If I said that to myself back in December, I'd probably kick present me in the balls... really, REALLY hard.

Does that mean it's going to beat out SoV as the longest vi...

Old(ish) Chart: Nuclear Sideshows

Many of the graphics for Nuclear Sideshows were made on my laptop, and I'd forgotten that I basically made a canvas to put them all together. Came across it while looking through the downloads folder, figured it'd be cool to share, added some labels, and voilà.

Don't think I need to say this, but yes, they are all to scale.

touchups

Over the past week or so I have taken a break from writing and have worked on updating my 3d model of TOTO to near obsessively perfect specs. Seeing as how TOTO will have a substantial section of the upcoming video dedicated to it (so don't worry if you don't know much about it, you will), I'm hoping to try and create some mock b-roll footage with it, as well as use it as a reference for any graphics of TOTO I create.

The 3d model of PATTI, the star of our upcoming show, has been comple...

TM-TM intro music

The intro song is usually among the first of the soundtrack that I choose bar the music for sequences that push me to make the video in the first place. In fact, the intro sequence itself is usually the first piece of the video I create, predating even the script (The intro sequence for Scale of Volcanoes was created in March of last year, crazy I know).

Along with Nuclear Sideshows, however, TV Movie and its Tornado Machine is an exception, and despite a substantial portion of the scri...

In case yall wanted a key to the latest community post

It's funny watching people try to guess what the first image means.

SoV leftovers

Got a bunch of miscellaneous things from when I was making the vid that are just sort of hanging around doing nothing, so why not share them?

1. Neat little graphic I made comparing Vesuvius and its magma reservoirs to a tornado and its parent supercell (the powerplants of their respective cone-shaped natural hazards, if you will)

2. Blender render of four successively higher stratovolcanoes. From front to back: Rainier, Elbrus, Chimborazo, Ojos del Salado. Gives a decent sense of...

Mark Thompson's Queen of the Lakes, a Rojo Recommendation

For the past few days I have been fueling my unquenchable lake freighter obsession by reading Queen of the Lakes, a comprehensive overview of the lineage of the largest ships to graze the Great Lakes. I don't know how many of you are interested in big ships, and of those I don't know how many are further interested in the niche of North American lakers, but if you are, this is a fantastic read by a veteran of Great Lakes shipping.

Not to mention this is an excellent source for when I in...

If I had to sum up my (most likely) next big video project using one image off my computer...

well... here's a blender render from five months ago...

The original idea

(volume seems to be a bit loud on this one, so heads up)

Been wanting to share this for a bit now, and since the "scale of" trilogy has been rounded out, the time is probably right. Back in December 2021 I had an idea for a video that would collectively try to put the size of clouds into perspective, and this included everything from natural condensation clouds to ash clouds to contrails. The video probably would have just been called "The Scale of Clouds", but as I started writing the ...

Old Chart: Scale of Mushroom Clouds

In the meantime while I compile a chart for the latest video, I came across this old thing buried amongst a billion other files. I made this shortly after uploading SoMC (apparently at 4 in the morning, which sounds about right for me), and while it's not my favorite chart, I figured it'd be neat to share.

The mushroom cloud of Castle Koon wasn't featured in the final video, but that's because there's actually short deleted segment that got removed last minute, something I'll share at a...

baddabing baddaboom

this is where I turn from creator to critic

bullseye

Having finally chopped up the last of the raw narration file, I now have an a close idea as to the length of the video.

With the exception of the outro and credits section, my prediction of roughly 1 hour 7 minutes seems to be dead on, so that's sweet.

Few more segments to complete, then comes audio polishing, and then we should have our monster. Aiming for an upload on the 26th, but given my fairly substantial progress this past week, it may be earlier.

Looking forward to g...

If there was any doubt...

yes, it'll be there

SoV Part 1

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. For those who wish to wait for the whole video, just skip over this. Otherwise, here it is.

tomorrow...

Sequential Release of the Video

While the video is progressing at a fair rate to what I'm used to, I understand this can drag on quite a long time. With Scale of Volcanoes, though, I'm in a unique position to release the video sequentially, as it is split into three distinct chapters discussing different attributes of a volcano and its effects (these chapters are not equal in length, but they are nonetheless separated). While I move on to parts II and III, I could upload part I to the patreon as a semi-early release for yal...

Everest submerged

a fairly cliche comparison, but here's Everest if its full height above sea level were placed at the Challenger Deep

I'm having too much fun right now with importing models to google earth, so lemme know if there's any more comparisons like this yall would like to see.

did I mention the two for one discount?

Never realized how trippy it is to let an open-ended piece of editing just trail off

progress

So I decided to bite the bullet and avoid falling into the trap of "recording narration sections separately and not liking how they sound slightly different from one another thus dragging it out for months" like I did with Nuclear Sideshows by just recording the narration in one sitting... yes, I did fall down the stairs as a child.

I guarantee you, though, the actual video will not be THAT long. Usually the narration gets cut down to between 1/3 and 1/2 the raw length (there's obviousl...

Another interesting comparison

The bookends of the video, in a way

A mildly informative essay before the video

Although now I have to narrate this thing... which I despise

Another brief view into how music shapes my videos:

As the script nears completion (I'm so close and it's driving me nuts) this is the point where I really start to look for songs that will fit with the flow of it. I came across this beautiful piece by Space Cassette and was originally considering using it as background for when I discuss the 2022 Hunga-Tonga eruption (the song was released in 2022, so I thought it would be fitting). Usually I listen to th...

Ash Clouds

Rough approximations with some other convective clouds for reference, definitely going to refine their shapes a bit before they actually go into the video.

If you can guess which eruptions these are from you get an imaginary cookie.

Soundtrack for TSoV

You should know by now that I care quite a bit about what kind of music goes into go into my essays, so much so that I'll often mold the script around particular songs well in advance. They are the bedrock that the video is built on, so here are some early contenders for the next one:

Definitely going to use-

Dark Ambition - Nicolo Bardoni

2024-08-26 06:01:49 +0000 UTC View Post

Script lengths

I think I have a problem...

Thinking ahead...

volcanoes first, though

The size of Mt. St. Helens

There are points during the making of the scale of videos when I audibly let out a quick "woah". For Scale of Tornadoes, it was Greensburg '07 and Andover '91 having a similar con-funnel height; for Scale of Mushroom Clouds, it was the fact that the Castle Bravo cloud was several times larger than Bikini Atoll itself; and this time around, it's the realization that you could quite nearly fit the entire skyline of Chicago inside Mt. St. Helens's eruption crater.

Starfish Prime Image Sequence

Eight images in sequence of Fishbowl's Starfish Prime showing the evolution of its debris cloud and aurorae. The "great white fingers" as they're described are visible from the second through fifth images as the large, arcing protrusion from the top of the flash reaching several hundred kilometers above the Pacific Ocean. It's difficult to judge the exact distance of the aircraft from Johnston Atoll (I'm sure some director's report has its location somewhere), but it looks to be a C-135 or so...