For my final project, I’ve decided to make a video on climate change. It pulls heavily from the work of David Wallace-Wells and is inspired by Carl Bergstrom’s warnings about misinformation. It’s only six minutes long, but packed with what I would consider the essentials to know regarding the feasible outcomes of climate change, as well as what’s being done currently to combat that.

One of my bigger frustrations with topics like climate change or anything on the scientific front is that if you want to familiarize yourself with those topics, you’ll likely have to sit down and read something, and that something can be particularly dense at times. I wanted to make this video to make the information easier to access, and I wanted to keep attention spans rolling. I’m hoping that by virtue of using this format, climate information will be accessible to more people and remain more memorable. Another goal of mine was to help provide visualization and to avoid just declaring numbers, because once you get into the millions it is difficult to conceptualize exactly what the death tolls and costs amount to. Plus, video editing is a passion of mine, and I found this project an excellent opportunity to marry what I like doing to what I like to talk about.

I want to touch on how the video was made according to its technical aspects. I then edited the video using Vegas Pro 18, which is how most of the text and images are placed on screen. Blender (my 3D modeling software) is used sparingly and is usually used to provide a sense of scale. The opening counter shot, the shot with 50,000 people, as well as the shot with the bar graph were all done in Blender, and only procedural textures were used; meaning no images were downloaded beforehand for textures, but rather textures were generated according to math. The counter for the 150 million figure was the most intensive, requiring the use of not only procedurally generated textures but procedurally generated geometry. A single segment was made manually, which was then copied six times for one full digit of the seven-segment display, which was itself copied 12 times to get the full panel of digits for the counter. The numbers themselves were generated using logic gates. Each digit would take as input any number, modulo it by 10, and each segment of the seven-segment display would check to see if it should turn on given the input value. This builds a working display, and all that remained was to drive the input numbers themselves. I tied the input values to the current frame, utilizing an exponential function in such a way that the numbers start changing rapidly, but eventually converge to their meant digits. The result is a realistically changing, fully procedural display. As for the shot with 50,000 people, that was done by modeling a single person as well as applying an array modifier to actually render 50,000 people. The bar graph shot was as trivial as two boxes with different scalings that were proportional to the statistics. If I had more time, I ideally would have made even more shots in Blender, but restraint is important for these kinds of things.

Then, there is the video’s structure. I first start off with the 150 million statistic to hook the viewer in a frankly melodramatic introduction, then that is when the actual introduction begins. The introduction then lays the expectations for the rest of the video as well as some boilerplate. After that comes the hard-hitting stuff: what to expect in the coming years given various warming scenarios, including but not limited to air pollution, water scarcity, as well as heat deaths. I do all this with the 50,000 shot in the background, to keep in the viewer’s mind the scale of tragedy being discussed at hand. I only discuss the scenarios between two and four degrees, for reason that is the window with the greatest probability of occurring. I could have talked about the eight degrees scenario, but the time it would’ve taken I think could have risked viewer engagement for not that much useful information. I then move on to the good stuff, the things that show we are fighting for a future even if current efforts are not enough. I mention nuclear, solar, and wind power, but I mainly focus on solar and wind energy. Of course, there is a brief aside about nuclear energy sources, and that it is cool, and that Chernobyl probably ruined things (because let’s face it, it certainly did not help the way we view the image of nuclear power). I then dump a bunch of choice wind and solar statistics, talking about just how much cheaper solar power’s gotten over the past few decades, as well as just how far we are from wind comprising 100% of our power grid. I next briefly focus on non-power related developments, such as genetically modified mosquitoes, vertical farming, and pongamia. Finally I wrote a call for action, supplying statistics showing just how many people think that climate change is nothing to worry about. I called for good-spirited debates as well as just talking to other people. I concluded the video with this and in addition gave some time for silence, just having music playing in the background for the viewer to reflect upon what they’ve learned.

It’s these steps which I hope take this video essay to the next level and place it in a spot where people will actually want to watch it. I don’t expect any real results, because I have the video unlisted until I can come up with a version I am even more proud of. Nevertheless, I think this is representative of the kind of media we need more of, informing content that’s easy to stomach.