Page 133 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

I occasionally used the glass over the U.S. Drought map to show the fire danger areas. I
would simply take a can of lighter fluid, pour a bit of the liquid on the glass over the
drought, light it with a match and keep clicking the camera. To study the jet stream and
upper winds, I would enhance the features of each day’s fax charts so I could animate
the monthly and seasonal changes in the weather patterns. This process showed how a
hurricane could be picked up and carried away in the westerly winds. In 1967 I made
one film that I hand-delivered to the Weather Bureau’s Regional Office in Fort Worth.

Around 1970, we had a special fax machine where we could dial-up pictures from
remote weather stations. I made a color transparent overlay for each station and could
make a movie from multiple pictures of radar echoes. These were the days before
Character Generators, or Chirons, for posted words and letters. The Art Department
could print white numbers on black paper. I cut them out individually to shoot a
Polaroid slide of the current temperature, humidity, wind etc. that I gave to Telecine
(the projector room) for the Director to display in the weather show.

In the 1970s, film cameras were being replaced with Sony video cameras. This made
time-lapse photography more difficult. I had to record a 30 or 40-minute movie of the
sky, and then go to an edit suite, copying two frames out of every 20 onto another tape
which could be played as a “fast-motion” picture. While we had used paper maps on
the weather set in the studio for almost 20 years, it was a huge adjustment when we got
our first Colorgraphic computer in 1980. While maps could be constructed in the
computer, we had to devise methods of overlaying movies, or events, on top of the
map. We could select cities to display temperatures. Occasionally, the data received
through a modem would have a glitch, or error, that we could not see until we were
doing the live broadcast. I was surprised during my broadcast one January day to see
the temperature for Tallahassee pop up as 135 degrees!

The illustrations of weather phenomena like hurricanes, hailstorms, and floods had to
be constructed differently from the art supplies I had used, but after months of
experimentation, I was able to continue to create weather animations on the computer.
Several years later, my index finger started locking in the joint from repeated mouse
operations. I went to an orthopedic surgeon, who informed me that I had “trigger
finger”, a locking of the joint. He cured it by injecting latex around the bone. I could
then create my graphics with no difficulty.

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