Fallout from the forecast
Angi and I taped today’s version of Coffee Break this morning. I led off with a few thoughts from the weekend discussion I read at Steve Lackmeyer’s blog at okccentral.com. I spoke with Steve on Sunday afternoon. The blog allowed for good discussion and debate on the fallout from forecasts.
On Friday night, I watched the OU basketball game while having dinner. The bartender mentioned the lack of people getting out that night because of the weather that had been forecasted: 3-6 inches of snow. Later, I heard similar comments. Jim Cowan from the Bricktown Association left a comment on Twitter about the weather forecasts hurting businesses.
I think Jim has a good point. After major storm events like the May 3rd tornado, OKC residents pay attention to the weather forecasts out of safety concerns. Sometimes, like Friday, it becomes unfortunate when the snow doesn’t fall. And that can hurt local businesses. But it’s probably better to be safe than sorry.
But the real conversation at okccentral.com came after Lackmeyer posted email from KFOR’s Mike Morgan. Read for yourself, there are four posts and a bunch of comments. The latest post has around 50 comments.
Lackmeyer’s blog generates comments and conversation. It’s not just pictures of celebrities to draw bots and search engines. Lackmeyer writes about topics people are genuinely interested in and they write back.
Spring, winter, spring… I’d prefer summer
Ladies and Gentlemen, spring and winter and then spring, all in the next few hours.
According to the National Weather Service there is a chance of thunderstorms today in the evening and nighttime hours. In southern parts of the state, the storms could be severe. Expect heavy rain and hail. Tornadoes are also a possibility.
By Friday morning, a winter storm is expected to affect NW Oklahoma, spreading south and east throughout Friday and into Saturday morning. Snow accumulations could be up to a foot in the NW.
Your OKC forecast: today, cloudy, a high near 57. 30 percent chance of storms, that increases to a 70 percent chance tonight.
Tomorrow: Temperatures fall to around 36 by 4 pm, rain before 4 pm, then sleet and possibly snow. On Friday night, there is a 70 percent chance of precipitation.
By Sunday, temps expected to return to near seasonal norms. Go figure.
Crocodile
Crocodile, a four keyboard band, stopped by Wednesday for a Static session with The Oklahoman’s George Lang.
Coffee Break for Friday
Looking for something to do before/after hoops?
Angi Bruss and Kyle Roberts shot this video in preparation of this week’s Big 12 basketball tournaments.
OU Pro Day
The Sooners held their version of Pro day on Tuesday in Norman. Kyle Roberts shot the morning event as Sooner players sprinted, jumped and tried their best to impress NFL scouts. Read more by clicking on sports on NewsOK.com.
Kyle did a nice job with this piece. Shooting for more cinematic than ESPN, the video does a great job with its closeups as the players cut back, with effects in the transitions and editing with the music. It’s stuff you notice but don’t notice until it’s not there.
Computer animation recreates Hudson River plane landing
From TechCrunch:
The computer animation in this video recreates the flight path and Hudson river landing of US Airways Flight 1549. Although the details of the story are by now familiar to nearly everyone—the plane hit a couple of geese, which took out the engines, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing on the Hudson, saving the lives of everyone on board—the animation captures the sequence of events in an extremely precise way. The animation is timed to the audio track from the traffic control towers,which really shows how little time there was for the pilot to act. The incident from strike to landing takes about two minutes (the audio has been edited a bit down from its original runtime of around four minutes)
OKC needs a new convention center
This didn’t go according to plan.
The OKC Chamber released a study this morning about the need for a new convention center. The study said the existing Cox Convention Center, 38 years old, is frankly holding the city back from earning more convention business. Mayor Cornett has been pushing for an improved convention center for a couple years. I heard him talk at length about this at his most recent State of the City address. Well spoken is Mayor Cornett.
Back to my small world. I expected to get the info for a quick video in advance of the study release. We would release a story online at NewsOK with a video around the same time. And I expected that to happen early in the afternoon.
So I’m in our green room this morning a little after 10 prepping for a Made in Oklahoma cooking segment with the Food Dude, The Oklahoman’s food editor Dave Cathey. His guest arrived early so we scrambled to accommodate and get ahead of schedule, which is always nice. Our studio was waiting for Sonya Colberg’s video interview with a local expert on stem cell research, a hot topic in the news with the president’s new policies.
Then we get word the Chamber study is now released. Early. No video ready. I have an outline of a script from Steve Lackmeyer’s story. Quick write-through. Fire up Studio B. Jacquelyn Farris rolls on the Black Magic software, which captures into a QuickTime .mov format. I bang through a quick read, Jacquelyn throws the file back to my laptop in my office.
A lot of our studio shoots go in this manner. We tape, then use post-production time in Final Cut Pro to add soundbites, b-roll, photos, audio and/or graphics. Same deal here. The video is about two minutes. Took about 10 minutes to edit, including building the Photoshop graphics and pulling pictures from our library of photos. The next steps included exporting and encoding into a Flash file and uploading to Brightcove to post on NewsOK. We turned the video in well under an hour.
MIO food segment will be online sometime soon, we often shoot our food segments in advance. Angi Bruss has a Wednesday morning shoot with Sherrel Jones on red beans and rice. We’ll post that online in a few weeks probably. Maybe sooner.
The stem cell video didn’t happen, I think it rescheduled for Wednesday.
Meanwhile Grayson Cook took a tour of the Cox Convention Center this afternoon, shooting video as Mike Carrier from the Convention Visitors Bureau gave us a tour of why the center needs to be improved. Grayson will edit and post that video on Wednesday morning.
Almost time for green beer
Round two of Steve Lackmeyer’s video blog that goes with his OKC Central blog. We shot six of these segments a few weeks ago in Bricktown.
For this episode, Steve interviewed Brent and Brett Brewer, who were gracious enough to spend a few minutes on a Friday morning. They spoke about their late father, Jim, and the legacy of Bricktown events such as next week’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities.
Earthquake in metro OKC
Woke up this morning, checked the iPhone for the latest emails and Twitter updates. Saw Tweets about an earthquake in the Del City area. Saw an email from Amie Gibson with the Oklahoma Geological Survey.
The Oklahoma Geological Survey recorded a preliminary magnitude 3.4 Earthquake located in the vicinity of Del City and Smith Village Oklahoma. The earthquake happened at 13:07 UTC. Please report felt reports to our website www.okgeosurvey1.gov
Amie Gibson
OGS
Using information from Amie and information gathered by The Oklahoman’s Brian Sargent and Michael Kimball, I voiced and edited a video using images from the OGS web site, NewsOK and a map created with QuikMap.
