Day-to-Day

Weather Caster on the Works.

May 31, 2015

I mentioned that during the flight I had some ideas for side projects that I could do here much more easily than in Vancouver. One of them follows along the lines of pOrtal, an app that allows you to control the atmospheric conditions on your surroundings.

I spent a couple hours yesterday working on the design of the app, much cleaner than the previous one:

And today’s afternoon getting plenty of After Effects expressions hooked up together to animate the thing almost from a single layer, named CTRL which holds several sliders and knobs. The previous time I used the video directly on the phone. Now I’ll try replacing the screen, so the animation can sync perfectly and I can tweak things if needed.

For the shooting process, since I’m in the middle of a tropical winter, we got all sorts of weather across a very brief time frame. I’ll set up the camera on a slightly safe position, encase it so if there’s a hailstorm, it doesn’t die on me, and timelapse for two straight days, taking a picture every two minutes. This will then be converted into a 30 seconds video, with a narration on top, explaining the app. After that, we’ll shoot my hand on a green screen, interacting with the phone, and adjust the lighting on the fly so it matches the weather on the timelapse. The third step is replacing the screen for the animation, which is easy enough at this point in the game.

I think the trickiest part will be matching the lighting on my hand well enough to the plates so it doesn’t feel off, but that’s at least half the fun. More updates will come as the work evolves.