Creating Tsunami: A Race Against Time

The Brief 

To create maps and motion graphics showing the progress of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami using real data points from the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). The documentary shares never heard before stories from survivors of the tragedy focusing on locals and residents of the countries affected. 

Client 

Blast Films 

Year Delivered 

2024 

What We Did

We utilised over 37 billion data points, and five hours worth of satellite data to create a graphical representation of the wave moving across the coast of the Indian Ocean, this is one of the most accurate recreations of the tsunami made to date. The data given to us by the NOAA amounted to five hours of data from deep water gauges that recorded the tsunami wave in real time as it moved across the Indian ocean. 

Our Junior Pipeline TD Ben Coath used a mixture of Python and Houdini to process the data, converting the billions of datapoints from NetCDF into 393GB BGeo files. Once the data was converted it was used to create the motion graphic wave moving across the maps we made of the Indian ocean and the surrounding countries. 

The Results 

We were able to present the data in a new and unique way, offering a fresh perspective on the natural disaster and learnt how to process such large amounts of information and convert it into a usable format for motion graphics. The graphic of the tsunami wave helps to visualise the disaster as it unfolded, providing key information on how the wave struck the coastline and which countries were affected first. In addition the maps we created help to show the impact of the wave across the different countries it hit and helps the audience witness the sheer scale of the natural disaster. 

Learn more about our work on tsunami here.