Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Snow Dragon Phenology

I'm choosing to ignore the weather forecast right now. It's a balmy 70° F outside, but the chance for a wintry mix exists for tomorrow night through Friday. It appears winter is in for at least one more encore. Which is irritating, but since the semester is winding down, I've got plenty of work to keep me busy before I start up another Dispatch from the Dirt Lab or Kelly McCullough and I work on our next "Seekrit Projekt." Hint: think "Fruit Ninja."

I just finished editing together all 4,000 time-lapse camera frames from our Snow Dragon hijinks from last month. It was the longest time-lapse movie I've ever done: nearly 6 weeks total. I ended up editing out much of the night time images, because there wasn't much to see. But if you watch the movie, you'll see no less than four distinct April snow events. Plus, there's lots of good melting and sublimation.

If you missed it the first time, here's the first movie wherein we actually build the entire dragon and take some silly pictures:
Building the Snow Dragon from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.
Time lapse sequence of our 5-day snow sculpting project. For more dragon-y stuff and info about this and other projects, visit kellymccullough.com.


And here's the finished project:
From Flake to Lake: The Birth, Life, and inevitable Death of a Snow Dragon from Matt Kuchta on Vimeo.
We built a giant snow dragon. It took us five days. Then we let it melt. That took five weeks. A time lapse view of the entire process (about 4,000 separate pictures) compresses six weeks into just 3.5 minutes. For more about this and other shenanigans, visit www.kellymccullough.com.

Creative Commons License: cc by-sa

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