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- What Is El Niño?
What Is El Niño?
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Layered papercut explainer · 52 seconds · English
A 52-second layered-papercut explainer: the trade winds hold the Pacific tilted, and El Niño is the moment they let go, so the warm water and the rain roll back east.
- The brief
- “What is El Niño?”
- Style
- Layered papercut
- Length and frame
- 52 seconds · 16:9
- Made for
- Lessons and courses
- Also on
- YouTube
How it was made.
The whole brief was the question, worded the way people search for it. The director picked the style itself. It pictured the Pacific as a bathtub in layered paper, half a metre higher near Indonesia than off Peru.
The name comes last: fishermen called it after the Christ child, because it arrived around Christmas. It cost $4.64 of model spend to make.
Every film on explain.film is made the same way: one sentence in, a storyboard you approve, then the director paints, voices, scores and animates it, and a critic model grades the cut before you see it.
Transcript
- Every few years, the Pacific sloshes like a bathtub, and the world's weather sloshes with it.
- Normally, the trade winds push warm surface water west, toward Asia, piling it up until the sea near Indonesia sits half a metre above the sea off Peru.
- El Niño is what happens when those winds slacken.
- The warm water rolls back east, and a warmer east weakens the wind even more.
- The rain follows the warmth: Indonesia dries out, Peru floods, and the anchovies vanish.
- Peruvian fishermen named it El Niño, the Christ child, for arriving around Christmas.
- So El Niño isn't a storm.
- It's the wind letting go of half an ocean.
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