 Hi everybody and welcome to the NCAR program. My name is Mark Mueller and I'm a science educator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR, which is in Boulder, Colorado. I'm with my colleague here, Dr. Daniel Ziello, and he's going to be coming to you from his home today, just like I am and probably you as well. And we're here to share with you today. Each week we want to meet with someone who works at NCAR and learn about what they do in their job and answer questions from those of you who are joining us. One really cool part about working at a place like NCAR is there are so many different types of jobs such as being a scientist, an engineer, an electrician, a computer programmer, a safety expert, a machinist, or Dan, who happens to be a visual media specialist. All these jobs and more help support our scientific research. Maybe some of you have already sent in questions ahead of time, but if you haven't, that's okay. Feel free to write anything today in the chat box and I'm going to be monitoring the chat box and I will get those questions out to Dan as he makes his presentation. I'm now going to turn it over to Dan who's going to tell you more about what he does and take your questions. Awesome, thanks Mark and hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. So again, I'm Dan and I'm a visual media specialist here at NCAR and today we'll just be chatting a little bit about my career path, how I ended up here at NCAR, and then we'll go on an adventure that you all are going to vote on to learn a little bit more about the filmmaking process and kind of the things we're thinking about as we make our films. All right, so let me finish admitting the last couple of people that are coming in here and I'm going to now share my screen and we'll get started. Awesome, so first things first, we'll just dive right in and start answering the question about what is a visual media specialist. So now I really want to take advantage of the fact that we're on Zoom. We can be pretty interactive. So if you don't already have your chat window open, go ahead, open it up and start typing in your ideas as to what you think or what you feel when you hear the words visual media specialist. Got some responses here. Maybe you work on documentaries or do you work with Photoshop? Yeah, sometimes Photoshop is definitely a big part of my job depending on what I need to do. And do you make documentaries or is that just one kind of thing you could be doing? So those documentaries are just one kind of thing that we're doing. Documentaries in my head are kind of longer, a couple hour type of deals and we're focused at a lot of the shorter kind of mini documentaries we like to call them. Do you work on VizLab type stuff? So unless on the VizLab creating virtual reality, alternate reality applications and more on videos that we can share on YouTube or social media or up on our website. And I'm sure you must have to travel for this and someone said, sounds like you must frame a story with video and photos. That was a good one. Yeah, and that's actually a great way to move on with our journey. So very simply put my job or part of my job, I have a lot of responsibilities, but a main part of my job is to help tell stories through film of the really bad science that we do here at NCART. So I'm just going to admit a couple more people as they come in. So my career path into this job was not at all straightforward and I would say that's pretty typical of the sciences and really like in general. So you should really embrace the fact that it's probably not going to be straightforward. But a lot of the foundation for what I needed started in college. So I went to a small school called Rollins College. And here I was really able to explore all types of things. So I was a physics and an art history major. I was also able to take classes in travel writing and music and studio art. So I was really able to get my brain thinking in lots of different directions. I was also really lucky to do undergraduate research. So I used the lasers to look at musical instruments. So this picture here, very simply put, there's a lot of physics behind this, but what you're looking at is basically a small circular flat plate that's been struck from behind and you're seeing how that actually moves. And then in college, I was also really lucky to travel a lot. I got to explore the world, got to really develop an appreciation for the environment and everything outdoors. And so when I finally finished college, I kind of wrapped all of these things up into one and started pursuing a career in geophysics. So I attended the University of Colorado to start pursuing a PhD. Let's jump back real quick. Now geophysics is a really big field. So in our chat window again, how about we type in some thoughts about what you think of when you hear the word geophysics? Somebody wants to know if that has something to do with earthquakes. Yeah. So I personally studied earthquakes, but that's just one kind of small part of what we could study with geophysics. What about just, is it planetary science in general? Yeah. So I do have a couple of friends who consider themselves geophysicists, the geophysicists who also studied not earth planets. So looking at Mars or Venus and kind of trying to understand extraterrestrial landscapes. Do you get involved with atmospheric fluid dynamics? Yeah. So atmospheric science tends to be its kind of own separate entity from geophysics, but we're both very interested in similar things about how these natural processes happen on earth. Does it also have anything to do with oceanography? Yeah. So I was an interesting mix of both studying earthquakes, jump back here real quick, studying earthquakes, but then we also tended to jump a bunch of instruments on the ocean floor. So it was this fun mix between having to understand what's going on in the ocean as well as studying earthquakes. Gotcha. And somebody wants to know if you study subsidence. Yeah. So I personally did not study subsidence, but that is, can go into a lot of avenues that geophysicists are studying because you can get subsidence, you know, right after earthquakes. Sometimes, you know, if the soil is moving a certain way, things can randomly sit side, you can get subsidence from, you know, glaciers melting and soil moving around and stuff like that. So that's definitely a part of geophysics, but a little outside of what I studied. And a couple of people wanted to know if it had anything to do with oil or looking for oil, oil exploration. Yeah, that's a huge subset I would say of geophysics is the oil exploration side of things. Again, a little outside of my expertise, I was way more focused on kind of academic earthquake studies. But a lot of people that you'll talk to who are in the oil and exploration industry started in geophysics. Cool. So maybe I'll admit everybody really quick. Now, one of the really cool things about for me, I feel being an earth scientist, is that you get to kind of travel all over the world and answer these really or try and answer these really cool questions. So I've been really lucky to do some stuff down in Southern Africa, all up and down the Rocky Mountain Front Range on a really tiny research vessel in the North Pacific, down in New Zealand. And then it was really when I was working in Nepal that I kind of had this realization. So we were in Nepal studying the glaciers there, you know, in a warming climate, those glaciers are slowly melting. And that can actually have a pretty negative impact on a lot of the villages that are downstream of these glaciers. Now through this video in there, just because I think it's really, really funny. Fieldwork is cool for a lot of reasons. But then there's also these moments where you have to try and figure out how to get a raft up and over a rock field at 16,000 feet. So it's just like really cool moment to like be creative in your thinking and then also to struggle with a raft on top of your head. But anyways, I was talking about Nepal because it was there where I kind of realized that, you know, I was going into these situations with my camera and I was taking video and photo and writing about it. And I really wanted to see if I could actually make this a career, you know, doing science as well as outreach and filmmaking. And so when I finished up my PhD, that's exactly what I did. I kind of drove headfirst full time into science filmmaking and outreach. And I know someone's going to ask, so I'll ask now, why do you have a boat at 16,000 feet? Yeah, yeah. So a lot of these glaciers sometimes will have these kind of lakes form within the ice. And so I was helping out a friend of mine. And my friend was really interested in studying the water in this ice. So what were the different kind of bits that were in the water? So we needed to like paddle out into the middle to actually collect the water. And then she was also really interested in looking at what the bottom of these lakes looked like. So we also had to get out into the middle of the lake to actually, you know, look down and see the bottoms. Got it. Yeah. Awesome. So that brings us to finally working at NCAR. And like I said earlier, I have a lot of responsibilities here. But one of my primary ones is to go out on field projects and help kind of document what's going on. So talk to scientists, showcase what the scientists are doing. So this is actually a picture of me on one of our recent field projects where I was in the cockpit of one of our research aircraft. And so to help tell me about why field projects are important, what they are, I'm actually going to show you a clip from the first 20 seconds of a new video on which we're working. So this hasn't been published yet. Y'all are going to be some of the first people to ever see this. So let's take a look. We are seeing the video Dan, just so you know, we are not hearing sound and that could possibly take a little bit away from it. But it is showing the video. For sure. Let me, so I'll stop my screen. I might have needed to click the share computer sound button. There we go. Now let's try this again. Curious about our earth? So are scientists. To understand our dynamic and complex planet, we must observe what's going on around us. Scientists participate in research expeditions called field projects, where they make observations to help answer a specific question about the earth system. Great. So to watch the rest of that video, you'll have to stay tuned to the next couple of months once we finally get it finished and published. But I wanted to now talk about a little bit about the scientific process. So in the side, in the scientific process, we have these questions that we're really interested in answering. And we have a couple ideas on how to answer those questions. And so these field projects are really an opportunity for us to go out into the real world and collect some real data and test these kind of thoughts that we have in our head. And you know, if they help answer the questions, great. And if they don't, great, we have more questions to then go out and explore. So to help talk about the process that we go through on these field campaigns as we're developing videos and these stories, we're going to have y'all vote on where you want to go. There's three possible field campaigns we could visit today to talk about filmmaking. The first is, oh, choose your own adventure. We're going to choose our own adventure here. So the first we could head up to Idaho with the weekend project, which was looking at wildfire smoke. We could head down to Argentina and the Rolampago project, which was looking at how really severe storms form in the central plains of Argentina. Or we could head to Costa Rica and the Otrecht project, which was looking at how storms form in the tropics. So in your chat window, go ahead and vote. You can vote A to head up to Idaho and weekend vote B to head to Argentina and Rolampago, or vote C to head to Costa Rica and Otrecht. All right, let's let votes come in and I'll do some tallying real quick. I'll give it a few more seconds here, but it looks like C has an edge by maybe one or two votes. All right, awesome. Let's head to Costa Rica. Let's go with C. Let's go with C. All right, so like I said, in Costa Rica, the scientists were really interested at looking at how storms form in the tropics. So if you ever look at Costa Rica on a map, it's on a very narrow strip of land that's kind of sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean as well as the Caribbean Sea. And when you're actually looking at the land as well, there's mountains on it. So there's this kind of fun play between the land and the water and then the air above it that's helped form some of these storms. And that video you just saw was actually taken from the window of one of the research aircraft that we had brought down there to help us study these storms. Now, before we ever step foot down in Costa Rica or on any field project, we go through a pretty long process called pre-production. And this is four, sometimes up to six months of just planning. So we're talking to the scientists trying to understand the research questions that they want to answer. We ourselves are thinking about what stories can we tell? How do we tell those stories? So that way, when we finally arrive at the field project, we're ready to go. We're set for success. We know exactly who we're going to talk to, when we're going to be talking to them. What events do we need to film? When are those events happening? And then we have backup plans and backup plans for the backup plans just so that we're ready. We're really set up for success. I also think a lot of people have a very romantic notion of filmmaking. The time spent with a camera in my hand actually filming is pretty small compared to planning and making sure things are ready to go. Now, once we arrive on the field project, we begin the production process. So we bust out our cameras and we start talking to people. So here we're talking with Lydia. She was one of our students that were involved on the field project. And she was talking us through kind of what a day in the life of a scientist is like on some of these field projects. We also have to collect what's called B-roll. Now, B-roll is any video or photo that helps support the story that you're telling. So, for instance, if Lydia was talking about launching a weather balloon, we then have to go film a weather balloon. So that's what you're seeing here. It's what this giant kind of white globe is. And then you also see me kind of pop in and out of this film. Filmmaking is this weird balance between being in somebody's face and then not being in the way. So you got to get close, get the really cool shots, but you also got to make sure people aren't tripping over you because they got to get stuck done too. Make sense. Yeah, for sure. We also try and use our opportunity down there for a lot of professional development. So we're helping students, again, Lydia is one of our students, learn how to communicate about science. You know, a lot of people don't necessarily have a lot of experience speaking about science on film, and we're there to help them through that. Now, I know I said at the beginning it's really important to plan. It's also really important to be able to think on your feet and capture moments that are just happening spur of the moment. So this was a time where we had a couple hours free in the afternoon. So we all jumped in the car. I drove south into the jungle basically, and we started hiking around the jungle and I started hearing howler monkeys, and I told everybody, hey, hey, be quiet really quick. And so I set up my camera, I filmed some audio of these howler monkeys, and that's actually what forms some of the introduction for all the O-Trek videos that we made, which is pretty neat. Now, once you collect all the video, all the photos that you need, you enter into the post-production process, and this could be from a couple weeks to a couple months, depending on how involved the videos are. And for this, I'm going to show you the first maybe 20 seconds of a video that we produced for O-Trek. We leave very early every morning. It is very important for us to fly into convection at the early hours because that's part of the idea of the project, and that's when the convection is developing. So if you want to see the rest of that video or any other videos that we produced about our field projects, you can hop onto the website that you see right here. I also want to plug that if you're interested in learning more about how scientists work with our pilots to fly research aircraft to collect really cool data about our atmosphere. We have an Explorer series talk coming up next week. You should also definitely check that out. And with that, I'll take any questions. Oh, great. Well, I've got some that go away kind of back earlier into the presentations. I'm going to start with that one. Okay. Was that voice, was the voice over in that unreleased video that you showed us first? Was that computer generated? It was not actually. That was a human voice. So we worked with a great voice actor that we've worked with before at NCAR. And she's very well trained, so you can kind of work with her to work on inflection points and how you wanted things to sound. But yeah, that's a human voice. Wow. And what was the audience for that type of video for? Or who is the audience for that first video? Yeah, the audience for that first video I dislike using the phrase general public because that's such a wide broth of the public, you know, but that first video was really for people that are interested in the earth sciences. They've come to our Mesa lab to explore more. And they're now standing at a place where they're about to learn more about field projects. So that's kind of an introductory, a very high level introduction to why field projects are important. And what we do on these projects for people that are interested in learning about them and may be interested in pursuing a career in earth sciences. Got it. And, you know, before you go do a field campaign, do you have to do initial research on that site like a lot before you go? Is it a big heavy, you know, pre production research process as well? Yeah, so we're really lucky in that since we're working with scientists who are also involved in a lot of the process of getting plans ready to go, we can kind of pick their brain for a couple things. So on our end for the pre production process, the planning is mostly understanding what questions are going to be asked and how the science, what, you know, instruments and events are the scientists going to be doing to help answer those questions. And then it's also really important to us to understand the local communities that we are going into, you know, not every community we go into is necessarily as open to being filmed or with people walking around with cameras. So it's also really important to do some research on math before you go into a project. That makes total sense. And, you know, that coming up with a question then is what's the essence of like a good, interesting science movie? Yeah, so in your, in your opinion, right? Yeah, for me, I mean, all any video you produce is really geared towards this very specific audience. So I would say, you know, the essence of a good video is knowing the audience you were trying to reach and eliciting some type of emotion in them. And for them to say, like, Hey, I understand what's going on in this video. This is really neat. And I'm really, you know, excited to learn more. Got it. And, you know, do you have a new project coming up? What might be your next project? Yeah, so with this pandemic, since we're all working from home right now, a lot of our efforts at NCAR right now are switching over to, you know, connecting virtually. What can we do to help people in their homes still learn about science? So that's our big efforts at NCAR. And then I also have some other side projects that are going on that are, you know, reaching people all over the world really to talk about their experience with what's happening to us right now. Have you ever used drones, Dan, to do filming? Is drone type a part of? Yeah. So I do have my UAS license. And if you're interested in flying drones, technically that is something you're supposed to get. It's fairly straightforward. So yeah, like I definitely have flown drones. That's another part where you really need to be careful and do your research about where you can fly a drone, which is why you need a UAS license. Because there are lots of controlled air spaces that you don't want to be flying into and then endanger people in an aircraft up in the sky, you know. So a lot of the drone work I've done, we were up in Arctic Alaska, for instance, running a drone around, which was really great, kind of capture all the tundra scenes. But even then we had to let people know, like, hey, we're about to launch up a drone just FYI. Makes sense, yeah. And so being that you've done a lot of these educational and outreach type videos, do you do any of your own projects outside of this? I do, yeah. So a lot of the stories I'm interested in telling outside of my work for Enkar are still very science-based and are really about getting people excited about science and the outdoors and just being able to participate in the world around us and to be curious about the world around us. So we have some cool, like, kid science shows that we're trying to get up and going. Like I said, we're working on that kind of documentary about this pandemic that's happening to us right now. So yeah, definitely have some side projects going on. And this is a nice question too. Do you have other people in your department, like, that work with you to do this, or do you do this all by yourself? No, definitely, definitely we have support. So I was kind of brought into Enkar to help with the very technical filmmaking side of things, but I'm not the only one helping develop these stories. So a huge shout out to my partner in crime, Lorena, who comes into the field with me. And she helps a lot with the planning things and getting different shots set up. She's also fantastic. We've been working with a lot of our Latin American communities lately, so she has, you know, she speaks fluent Spanish, so she can help with a lot of the translations and getting, you know, really stories that I probably wouldn't have been able to get just on my own, you know. So filmmaking in general is definitely a team sport, you know. You need lots of people to make this successful. How long have you been working at Enkar doing this? Is this a new project for you or is this a lifelong project? So I started at Enkar about a year and a half ago now. So I would say the interest in film and science and outreach, that's definitely been around since, you know, college. So 15 years or so now. And then really the last, you know, like five or six years, I've really started focusing more on, you know, honing my skills and honing my craft in filmmaking and telling stories. Here's a great technical question from a videographer today. What's the ideal time length for a short documentary that you find holds the audience's attention? Yeah, so there's a lot of very interesting research out there about that, and it kind of goes back to what is your mission and intent with your film? With, I mean, with the advent of online platforms like YouTube and stuff like that, you know, in general, attention spans have gotten shorter. People are really interested in kind of their shorter, less than three minute videos. There's something about ticking over three minutes that people are like, Oh, that seems too long. I'm not going to watch that anymore. So if you want, like a really short, punchy, like, Hey, here's something really cool, and then get out, definitely keep them less than three minutes. But then on the flip side of that, there's something very powerful about kind of keeping your audience immersed in information for an extended period of time. So when we get to longer documentaries that are over, you know, 30, 40 minutes long, like sure that you kind of have to rely on your audience to have an investment in those, but you can tell a much more powerful and deep story with those longer documentaries. So it just kind of goes back to kind of what is your intent for that specific audience? Great, we have time for a couple more questions. And I got a good one here. If you could do a movie on a topic or a region of your choice, what would you want to show us? Oh, that's a great question. I think with everything that's going on right now, I'm really interested in kind of the spirit of human resilience and you know, what kind of stories can we tell around that? Because it's, you know, you kind of turn on the news every now and then to get your updates, and it's a bit of a bummer, right? So what kind of positive stories can we be telling about resilience and just creativity and adaptation around everything that's going on? That's great. Well, I think we are close to our 30-minute time period, and I'm not seeing a lot of questions that we haven't addressed. So is there anything else that you'd like to just finish up with, Tim? Yeah, I would say, you know, there are lots of ways to be involved within the sciences. You know, one of my big pushes, like I said earlier, is to get everybody to just feel like they can be a scientist, they can be curious about the world around them, and everybody is welcome within the sciences, and we need everybody in the sciences to start asking these complex questions and finding solutions to these complex problems. And so for me, you know, it's just if you're interested in the sciences, there's so many things you can do within the world of science. You know, I'm now making films and I'm still within the sciences. I know pilots who are within the sciences, you know, education experts who go out into these communities and talk to people are within the sciences. So there's just so many really cool things you can do. Oh, that's great. Well, we thank you so much for sharing today, Dan. Your work sounds really cool. Now we're going to make sure that people can see in the chat some places to go to find out more about this in the future. So I'm going to add in the chat right now where our pages online that will tell you how to find out where these will happen again. Ask in the car series. I'm also going to show you Dan's work highlighted online and you can find that at the next URL that I'll put in. And if you want to go directly, that's directly to the campaign. And then also if you want to go to the one that he was just talking about this entire performance, so to speak, we're going to let you also look at this one. It's very similar, but they're kind of large URLs, so we'll get them in the chat so you can copy and paste them in there if you'd like to use them. There we go. Also like you know folks, if you'd like to learn more about weather, the atmosphere and the sun, that's what we're up for. So we're here at sciad.ucar.edu. That was that first one. And we will hopefully have more of these in the future. Thanks again, Dan, for your time. Yeah, thanks everybody. Have a great day.