Making friends with the Four Friends of Fire

A holiday repost

I’ll leave the intro as short as possible today because I’m in holiday mode. Still, I felt compelled to try to continue the run of roughly weekly posts since kicking off here at Future Fire, and lucky for me I have a few up my sleeve from the archive. Here’s one about an animation I made back in 2019, something I’m hoping do again before too long. The post first appeared at the website of the community science series a friend and I run.

I’ve always been a fan of good science communication. Good any communication, to be honest, but what makes good science communication so… good is that truth is often stranger than fiction. Learning something new and surprising about life, the universe and everything, in the capable hands of a talented communicator? There’s nothing like it.

Of course, I loved the climate dogs as soon as I saw them. Engaging, amusing, educational, they ticked all the boxes. I’d been working and studying in the climate change area for a few years and it seemed obvious to me that projects like this had a major role to play in reaching a divided and underinformed public. Why didn’t we do this more often? Although I often came back to those dogs over the years, enthusiastically spamming colleagues, it wasn’t until 2018 that I thought seriously about making something myself, in my own discipline of bushfire science. I figured the climate dogs project itself would be a good place to start, so I did some digging (heh) and got in touch with some of the key players.

Graeme Anderson from the Victorian State Government told me how the project was developed there as a science extension tool for farmers and rural audiences, then expanded to the entire country with a whiz bang website to boot. As of writing, you can find a great (and highly pun-laden) account of the whole thing written in 2015.

 I also spoke to Clem Stamation, the genius who took the department’s scripts and brought them to life (animated, literally). Given the incredible job he did and his other work, I started salivating at the prospect of working with him on an undisclosed fire science project. Unfortunately I didn’t have the same kind of resources to throw at the project as the state and federal governments did with the climate dogs, not just in terms of animation but script development, audience testing, you name it.

Undeterred, I set to work trying to turn my vague ideas into something more concrete. Channelling my inner Douglas Hofstadter, I asked myself what the ‘climate dogs’ of fire would look like. I knew it should be fairly general, while still delivering important concepts, and of course in a highly engaging style. I was only a few years into my career in fire science so I didn’t have a great feel for the major concepts at play. The fire regime concept was an obvious one, but I couldn’t think of a snappy way to bring it to life in an animation. What about the four switches of fire?

The four switch concept originates from both Sally Archibald in South Africa and Ross Bradstock in Australia, who developed it around the same time independently, a la (lol) the independent development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz. It states that for a major landscape fire to take place, four things are required: there must be sufficient fuel, the fuel must be dry enough, there must be an ignition, and the weather must favour the outbreak and spread of fire. If any one of these four ‘switches’ are not on, then no dice – you won’t get a big fire. The four switch concept appealed to me for a number of reasons. It was simple, it was clear, it allowed for considerable nuance (a pet love of scientists). And it represented a useful re-framing of what we already understood about wildfire. By presenting these features as switches, several important questions came into focus. Which switches are on most rarely (‘limiting’, in the parlance) in different parts of the flammable world? What will climate change do to each switch, especially the limiting one? Most helpfully, the four switches lend themselves to personification!

Keyboard at fingertips, I began writing a script about the four switches of fire. There was Phil the fuel, Des the dryness, Iggy the ignition and Wes the weather [I sometimes wish I hadn’t gendered them. -Ed]. Thanks to the power of the concept, this stuff practically wrote itself. I quickly developed not only an introductory script, but several follow up ones focused on each switch, as well as climate change. Now that I now had some words, I needed a designer to draw up some concepts.

Lucky for me I have within arm’s reach here in the Blue Mountains my own design genius, David Shooter. Currently at Cocoon Creative [David is no longer there, but I’d be delighted to put any prospective clients in touch with him! -Ed], David has done many fine things, not least of which was designing the logo for our little community science affair, Science at the Local.  I asked him to come up with concepts for what I began to call the Four Friends of Fire and was overjoyed with the results. I was then double overjoyed when he put me in touch with an animation studio smack bang in the middle of Wollongong, where I ply my trade as a bushfire scientist.

In the mean time I’d been made aware of a small pool of funds for academics in my group to do fieldwork, attend conferences and otherwise progress their careers. In the fashion of many such funding pools, if the monies were not spent by the end of the year, they would vanish, never to be seen again. I fearfully inquired whether a project as frivolous as this might qualify and to my huge relief it did. Not only that, but the figure was just the right amount to get a 1 minute video from Rockshelf Productions. I began working with Phil Jennings there and in a very seamless process, he turned my draft script and Dave’s concepts into a working (moving) video, responding patiently and rapidly to my concerns both scientific and egocentric. Part way through the process it became clear that a little more funding would make a big difference to the final product, and in swooped angel investor and University of Melbourne collaborator Trent Penman [now boss! -Ed] to seal the deal.

​Flawed though it is, I’m quite proud of the Four Friends of Fire and would love to see it spread far and wide. It’s unabashedly targeted at the general public and so would make good fodder for school curricula, community announcements, waiting rooms and parliamentary foyers (in my humble opinion). I would dearly love to make the rest of the series but do not have the resources to do so presently [I did make one more! -Ed]. If you’d like to help me get there, please drop me a line at hamishc [{(at)}] uow.edu.au [I’m no longer there - you can find me by clicking contact here -Ed]. Thanks for reading and thanks for watching.