Raj Mankad

A View of Ike

The above video was made by Sara Fernandez. She wrote, "Setting my camera on interval record looking out of my bedroom window (my home is in Montrose, west of downtown Houston) was always on my list of things to do. Hurricane Ike was the motivator to get it done. I wanted to capture the movement of the clouds and to see the storm that I would not have the guts to stand in front of my window to watch. I set the camera up at sunrise, 7:07 a.m. It was set to record 2 seconds every 30 seconds. Unfortunately, when the power went out I only had one and a half hours of battery life and was unable to keep it going throughout the night. I used a bit less than three mini DVs (one hour duration) during approximately 19 hours. The audio is from the two-second clips of television news from the morning and at night. I condensed over two hours of video into the segment that you see." I think the movie is arresting. It reminds of an essay about Houston in Smithsonian Magazine I read called"Southern Comfort" by poet Mark Doty. He wrote:
[T]he sky seems vast, and from any parking lot you can watch big white towers of cloud sail up from the Gulf of Mexico 50 miles to the south as if they were navigating the ship channel beneath them. The expanse of sky is so wide, there's often more than one thing going on. Rain may darken the western rim while a fierce sun illuminates cloud towers in the center and a brilliant blue fills the east. How can you forecast the weather when it's doing three things at once?
If you enjoyed this video, you will probably love this large mp4 download from the National Weather Service called "Life of Ike."

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