Author: Hope Myers

Shanghai: The Sinking City

Partners: Theresa Lin & Vicky Chen

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mPz7Hrng-BfNPqdMZegS3uQhRlQHJKIZ/view?usp=sharing

Overall I am pretty happy with how our project turned out. Although it was a little difficult at first I enjoyed the process of matrix storyboarding and learned a lot about how to structure our thoughts to create a coherent story. I agree with a lot of the feedback we got on the film, especially about interviewing locals or government officials and including their clips to break up the monotone of the narration, however since that would have required a lot of time and remaking pretty much the whole video I focused on changing the things that could be done in editing.

Based on class comments I changed the video to:

– make the background music a little softer

– have the line held constant while the outline of the buildings sink below it

– take out the side comment at the government so it can be appropriate for Chinese audience

– take out the Boom to make the tone more similar

– only show the paper with water pouring, don’t let people see the sink

In the future I think it would be interesting to combine subsidence with knowledge about rising sea levels due to climate change to further emphasize the criticality of the issue. One thing that might be cool would be to make a timelapse map, like the ones that show rising sea levels covering Shanghai over time, that also includes subsidence. I found some heat maps of subsidence online which we included in the geocinema video but I think a moving map would be more interactive and make the film more interesting rather than just having a static picture.

Collaborative Project Development – Geocinema

Hope Myers, Theresa Lin, Vicky Chen

March 25th 2019

Shanghai: The Sinking City

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JceFybAID001YDOmid5qdkas_CKWLiEz/view?usp=sharing

In the beginning we struggled a little bit because we did not completely understand the concept. We originally decided to focus on the area of Lujiazui but were having trouble relating it to the concept of weather. After spending a lot of time on google we found a paper talking about the subsidence of Shanghai and after researching the issue more and finding it very interesting we decided to base our geocinema video on that. However we also still focused on Lujiazui and the bund because those are the areas with the tallest buildings and most subsidence.

We started off storyboarding using the five categories Solveig and Asia showed us in their workshop and from there we were able to create more of a timeline. The structure of the video is based of the history and development of Shanghai as a land mass as well as a city.

When deciding what assets to use for our video we had a bit of trouble originally because the concept of subsidence is hard to show since the movement is so slow and we also could not film underground. We decided to shoot mostly cityscapes, people, and the metro to cover all the aspects that impact ground subsidence. We also found some graphs and timelapses online. One thing we wanted to shoot ourselves was the cracks or sinkholes on the streets, however since they get repaired very quickly we did not find any and instead used pictures posted by other people.Vicky also hand drew an outline of the Shanghai skyline which we used to create a stop motion animation. With Ann’s suggestion to create a clip of what we imagine the future of Shanghai to look like, we submerged the drawing of the Bund in water to blur the ink. This created the illusion and our interpretation of what Shanghai would be in the near future. We felt like it would give our viewers a more tangible image of the importance of this issue.

Because we already had a good idea of what direction we wanted to take our film in, the editing process was fairly simple. All we had to do was combine the footage and photos into an order that matched with our script. We also decided to add subtitles so it would be easier for the audience to understand clearly what was being narrated in the video. We added Chinese translation because it’s an especially important topic for Chinese speakers since our video is about Shanghai.

Overall we are pretty happy with how the film turned out and I think it captures the story that we were trying to tell. If we were to work on it more in the future, and maybe make it a longer film, it would be nice to be able to find some of the cracking streets as they happen. It would also be interesting to extend the story line more to include the aspect of climate change and rising sea levels and that impact on Shanghai’s elevation, as well as interviewing some local people or government officials to see what they know about the problem and what things can be done to prevent it.

I looked through the WCS data and found that most of the animals didn’t have data downloadable but I was able to get a JSON file of deep sea corals. However the were over 600,000 data points so I decided to look at specifically Stoloniferan coral and I cleaned up the data to only include lat, lon, and depth.

Once I had the data I based my code off Leon’s flight example to find the right piece using console log and then plotting them all. I originally started out just suing circles but then I decided I want to better represent the data visually so I found a coral image and changed it to five colors to show the different depths of the corals.

  

I also included a legend to match the color of the coral with it’s depth. In the future I would like to make this legend a slider where it will show or hide the corals based on their depth.