Video Production

Dr. Dorothy Hall wrote the script for "Glacier Bay, Alaska, from the Ground, Air and Space," with contributions from Dr. Carl S. Benson/Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska; C. Suzanne Brown, geologist; Janet Y.L. Chien/General Sciences Corporation; and Brian L. Suderman/Glacier Bay Park and Preserve, Alaska. W. Allen Kenitzer and Ernest J. Shannon/Goddard Public Affairs Office narrated the script, which was recorded by Chris Meaney/ATSC in the sound room at NASA Goddard TV. The narration was edited in the SVS by Starr and sent to Big Shot Productions, Baltimore, MD, for final mixing. Music tracks were added by the production company and sound effects were created to enhance the imagery on the video.

The producers, Dr. James P. Strong/SVS and Cindy Starr/HSTX/SVS assisted Dr. Hall in developing the storyboard of the imagery to accompany the narration. Material for the video, including photographs from the early part of this century, more recent slides, and graphic images were woven with live action video segments and computer animation of satellite imagery to give an interesting historical perspective of glacier changes in the region.

Images used for 3-D fly-by's in the video

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Starr generated some visualizations for the video using images created by Janet Chien/GSC/Laboratory for Hydrospheric Processes. Starr produced a host of other special effects, creating 9 spectacular "fly-bys" of scenic rides over the glaciers. Starr created texture maps from satellite images and overlaid the texture on a 3-dimensional model that she generated from digital elevation data prepared by Chien to produce these 3-dimensional perspectives of the bay. She created animations of the area using Wavefront's Advanced Visualizer. For other effects, Starr and Chien prepared digital picture sequences that portray techniques used to register satellite images to maps drawn by early explorers.

1 MB quicktime movie of live video footage.

The video contains dramatic, live video footage of ice fronts calving into the sea, as well as other video footage shot by David Affens (Code 480) on location.

Pamela O'Neil/RDC performed the offline editing on the SVS's Avid Composer. Andy Acuna/HSTX/SVS assisted with compositing the digital frames using Wavefront's Composer.

The final production was completed at Digital Betacam quality at Big Shot Productions. Nearly 10,000 digital images were loaded on a 12-minute Hewlett Packard video disk and transported to the production studio along with two 9GB Avid disk drives holding the preliminary version of the video. In addition, 50 slides of the area that were collected by Dr. Hall were shot with a motion control camera at Big Shot. The final production was assembled by Big Shot.

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