The longer human activities are changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the more visible, wider, and longer lasting the scope of environmental impacts may be. Your challenge is to tell a visual story about the impacts of the pandemic using Earth observation data and other complementary information.
City life had gotten Nel, a crow, accustomed to finding scraps of food on the streets. But as the pandemic struck and people started to stay indoors, her source of food dwindled. A Scavenger’s Sight is an immersive story where the reader is placed into the mind of a crow as she travels across a series of locations in search of food for her children. Learn about the various impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic as you explore the city, harbor, countryside, and much more from our scavenger’s sight.
What is it?
A Scavenger’s Sight is an engaging animated tale about a crow named Nel who takes the reader on a journey as she searches for food in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown. The solution to the challenge informs the various impacts of the pandemic in a simple and lucid way as we highlight the bewilderment of Nel due to the drastic changes in the world around her. Moreover, the humorous remarks of Nel such as “I used to race with so many of these, but it seems like none of them fly anymore” when talking about parked airplanes, give the story an emotional and relatable appeal, and also hold people’s attention.
Why is it important?
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a global concern, not only because of how deadly the virus is, but also because of the effects it has had on the environment and economy. Government actions that attempted to diminish the spread of the virus have led to various other changes. Therefore, being aware of these changes could provide us with an idea or a pattern on how things might proceed to change in the upcoming years, how events will unfold if another pandemic hits us, and how we, along with future generations, can be better equipped to deal with such issues with these lessons.
What do we hope to achieve?
The Earth Observing Dashboard provides sufficient tools for analysis from data collected through various satellites and machine learning algorithms. However, this data might not make a lot of sense to people from non-scientific backgrounds. Thus, A Scavenger’s Sight hopes to break down the complex information and imbue a simpler and exciting way to understand these effects. Doing so will compel the audience to dive deeper into the Dashboard. As we educate people about the impacts of Covid-19, we hope to share and inspire a sense of curiosity and drive that could result in people striving to address these issues. We also hope to highlight how the Dashboard can be used as a storytelling device and raise awareness about NASA, ESA and JAXA.
Future scopes
Our future prospects include developing this story into an interactive interface for greater impact. This could be achieved by gamifying the experience, where the user gets to control the crow in first person and visit various locations in a series of quests to learn about the effects of the pandemic. To implement this, a game engine like Unity could be used.
What inspired us?
We chose this challenge because it had the scope to inspire a large audience and educate them about the impacts of Covid-19. We hope that by making a story of the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, the future generations could be made more aware and knowledgeable about the ways to tackle problems similar to these.
How did we develop it?
We had to conduct research extensively on the impacts that were more visible and which could be linked to other effects to include them in the form of a visual story. To do so, we used the indicators in the Earth Observing Dashboard. We chose to analyze and retrieve information from places in the US, most notably New York, Newark, Washington DC, and Glenn.
We explored various mediums of storytelling such as comics and webpages and settled on a short animated video to make it concise and user-friendly. We came up with a seamless script which would flow from one impact to the other, implementing the information that we had. A crow was decided to be the mouthpiece of the story since it can cover long distances and terrains, which would be ideal in weaving the story. We wrote dialogues for the crow for every impact that was going to be discussed and we used personification to make them more lively and compelling. For instance, when the crow flies over a harbor, she says "Are all of these whales dead? They used to rule the seas". This use of an unintentional metaphor by the crow as she mistakes the ships to be whales is amusing while also educating the audience about the actual impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. We elaborated on these effects by supporting these dialogues with facts and explanations.
After the storyline was ready, we created detailed illustrations of the bird and the different scenes and animated them. Ambient noises, sound effects and a music track were added to complement the scenes.
Software tools that were used in the project were Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Animate, Premiere Pro and FL Studio.
Our challenges included choosing which impacts to focus on and create a story around, and making sure our project would influence a diverse community of people. We wanted to make sure that our story would be comprehensible by people from all walks of life.
We used the Earth Observing Dashboard to identify and collect important aspects without which our project wouldn’t be. We used the satellite information to identify trends and highlights to be incorporated into the story. After finalizing the storyline, we implemented the data from the Dashboard to write explanations of the various impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. Indicators that we used were airports, ports, activity (cars/containers), harvesting activity, air quality, greenhouse gases and water quality. Using these indicators, we constructed a story that connected all of them together.
Our solution could be integrated by embedding the video in the Dashboard.
Earth Observing Dashboard - As mentioned above, we used the satellite information to identify trends and highlights to be incorporated into the story. After finalizing the storyline, we implemented the data from the Dashboard to write explanations of the various impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. Indicators that we used were airports, ports, activity (cars/containers), harvesting activity, air quality, greenhouse gases and water quality. Using these indicators, we constructed a story that connected all of them together.
Google Images - Reference images were used to create illustrations of the cityscape and the bird.
#Storytelling #PersonifyingExperience #Crovid #CovidScenes
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.