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Colorado Broadcaster Illustrates Fires With Curious World Maps
London, UK - September 2002
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When fierce forest fires swept through Colorado earlier this year, local broadcaster and ABC affiliate, KMGH-TV, turned to Curious Software's
The Hayman fire, as it was locally known, was a massive blaze - the largest in Colorado's history - that threatened the densely populated Denver metro area. Burning less than 50 miles southwest of Denver, it forced the evacuation of thousands of Colorado citizens and its close proximity to Denver's suburban population made it the top news story in every newscast for several weeks. Local residents were understandably worried about the speed and intensity of the fire and not only wanted to know which areas were already affected, but which areas were under threat should the wind direction change.
Along with the usual aerial views of the smoke, interviews with fire fighters and pictures of residents packing their belongings ready for evacuation, KMGH felt the best ways to illustrate the story was through the extensive use of detailed maps. The station's art director Mark Montour-Larson says: "We demonstrated the fire's destructive nature by showing the impression it had made on the land. Plotting the fire's perimeter on a series of maps gave our viewers an understanding of what had been destroyed and allowed us to show them what areas might be threatened next."
Before the fire started, KMGH was already running Curious World Maps software and was using it to illustrate general news stories such as election results, crime scenes and traffic accidents. Curious World Maps is a unique and powerful software package that allows the user to create broadcast quality, highly-detailed, still and animated maps of anywhere in the world for use in broadcast television news, documentaries, video and film production and post-production, websites, and a wide range of other media. The software, which is incredibly quick and easy to use, runs on any Windows® PC or Mac®.
Montour-Larson admits the Hayman fire gave KMGH an opportunity to really put the software through its paces. "We first came across Curious World Maps in November 2001 and as soon as I evaluated it I knew it was going to save us an enormous amount of time," he says. "In the days before Curious, we were creating maps by scanning pages from an Atlas into Quantel Paintbox and then drawing in all the detail such as county lines, cities and towns by hand. It took up to an hour to create each map and tied up an enormous amount of our Art department's resources."
When the fires broke, KMGH turned to the map of Colorado included in Curious World Maps' selection of templates. This already featured the details Montour-Larson and his team used to have to draw in by hand. Version 3.5 of the software offered added benefits including numerous tools for zooming in or out of a region, adding station branding and logos and adding labels to make the maps more informative and easy to read.
"During the hottest moments of the fire we were easily producing a dozen or more maps per day," he says. "Curious World Maps allowed us to do so with enough flexibility to version the same map for a variety of uses. One producer might want a map to show that day's destruction, but later in the same show we'd change a few labels and use the same map as a locator for evacuation zones. A few more changes could quickly turn the map into a chroma-key wall so that the anchor could stand in front of it and point to the frontlines where fire fighters were concentrating their efforts. Work that used to take us an hour was now being done in a matter of minutes and we were able to use the same basic templates to incorporate all kinds of revisions and updates."
Mark Montour-Larson says another great feature of the software is its ability to animate. Although this wasn't put through its paces during the fire story coverage, he has used the software's animation facilities on other projects to yield dynamic results.
He is also a fan of the software's GPS feature, which allows KMGH to accurately place the location of major incidents. "We recently used this feature to great effect when we covering the tragic story of a helicopter that had crashed while battling another Colorado fire. The crash was in a remote area and was proving difficult to place on a map due to the lack of landmarks and roads that might define the location. Once our news helicopter arrived at the scene, our pilot relayed his GPS location information to us, we typed in the numbers and within second the map was done."
Curious World Maps is the Gold Standard in a demanding industry. It is in daily use by the best in the business including: ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, NBC, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Weather Channel and many other broadcasters around the world.
KMGH are convinced that Curious World Maps has not only made a significant impact on their news presentation abilities but has also given them an edge on their competitors. "It's our secret weapon," Mark Montour-Larson adds. "In fact we'd really prefer no other broadcaster to ever found out about it!"
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