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- What Is Heat Lightning?
What Is Heat Lightning?
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Layered papercut explainer · 53 seconds · English
A 53-second layered-papercut explainer: heat lightning is an ordinary thunderstorm too far away to hear, its light carrying a hundred miles while its thunder fades after ten.
- The brief
- “What is heat lightning?”
- Style
- Layered papercut
- Length and frame
- 53 seconds · 16:9
- Made for
- Lessons and courses
How it was made.
The whole brief was the question, worded the way people search for it. The director picked the style itself. It made a paper diorama of a quiet summer night, then raised the camera over the ridge to show the storm.
The curve of the Earth gets its own scene. It cost $4.66 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
- On a hot summer night, the horizon flickers, but no rumble ever follows.
- We call it heat lightning, as if the warm air itself were sparking.
- It isn't.
- It's an ordinary thunderstorm, just very far away.
- Its flashes can light the clouds up to a hundred miles off, but its thunder fades out after about ten.
- The sound weakens as it travels, and bends up and away from the ground, long before it can reach you.
- The storm itself sinks below the horizon, behind the curve of the Earth, so all you see is its glow on the tall clouds above it.
- So when the sky flashes in perfect silence, you're watching someone else's thunderstorm, just too far away to hear.
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