Author: Doug

A fire consumed a home at 10th Avenue South and University Drive in the City of Saint Cloud, MN.

Reports from the scene indicate that all occupants made it out safely, but the home appears to be a total loss.

Multiple fire crews from surrounding cities provided mutual aid for this incident.

© 2025 Doug Kiesling – All Rights Reserved.

Hey everyone, Doug here.

I’m still reviewing the 5 hours of footage from Saturday, but I wanted to share a short highlight time-lapse video of what my 9-year-old daughter, Laura, and I saw of the tornado outbreak near Clear Lake, SD, on June 28, 2025.

This was her first time accompanying me on a storm chase, and it was one of the first real chases I’ve been on this year, as I haven’t been able to chase much due to family obligations. She counted seven (7) different tornadoes touching down before sunset.

It is safe to say the next generation of storm chasers will be amazing.

She even outdid me on the “Fn Wedge” comment from the Quinter Kansas tornado I shot in 2008, with a brand-new tagline that will make all the veteran chasers nod and salute because “Oh Dude, It Destroyed It, It Just Destroyed It!!!!”

Please share this link; do not download and re-upload our content to your social media page.

Music from epidemicsound.com
Song: Defector – Isaac Elliott

As the severe weather season ramps up for later today, 4/17/2025, it looks like our first realistic chase day here in the upper Midwest.

I have only been able to get out to chase a few times over the past few months during winter, and even then, it was barely what it was compared to a few years ago.

There was a decent winter storm at the beginning of March, but the worst weather was further south in Iowa and Nebraska, which I was unable to attend that party.

Then we had the April Fool’s Day snowstorm, another wake-up call that winter was not over for us in Minnesota.

But the focus now is back to severe weather. I have been working on my drone skills in the weather to capture lightning from the sky. The footage below was something that I shot from the back yard when the high-based pop-up thunderstorm was about 10 miles away in Benton County. All of last year, I was busy working on a non-weather gig, so I need to get my focus back on what the universe wants me to do.

The forecast and the schedule have me chasing in extreme southwestern Minnesota for what looks to be a cold core setup. I wish I could make it down to the Omaha area, but unfortunately, that will have to wait for another chase. I have to be home later tonight since Laura does not have school on Friday. This weekend is Easter, so I will most definitely be home for Church on Sunday.

Until the next update. I plan on trying out the new live streaming setup so that I might be live later today.

After a year-long hiatus working on non-weather projects, metaphorically taking “The Red Pill,” and learning a lot about myself, 2025 is set to be an awakening.

So, where have I been? It is a long story, but I’m happy to say I have time to restart my old projects, such as this webpage, which has been down for almost six months because I never had time to work on it.

It is like that old joke about an auto mechanic, how many vehicles they own run, and how many vehicles they own that are dead because they are constantly working on everyone else’s vehicles and not their own personal vehicles.

For the last year, I have been working on other projects, which meant I was focusing my knowledge and experience on helping another company with their video and social media projects.

Now, I have the time to reboot, clean up past projects, and start the Aftermath project. Starting today, life as I know it is about to get even more amazing.

If you’re a casual follower of this website and have been wondering what I have been doing for the last several months, pretty much nothing. There is nothing to chase for winter weather in Central Minnesota.

This season is nonexistent, with a total snowfall here in Saint Cloud, MN; this winter, we’re at 11.0 inches from December until this weekend. That is less than a foot of snow when last winter, St. Cloud recorded a whopping 88.2 inches for the season, just edging out the old record of 87.9 inches from 1964-65, per the MN DNR.

We typically average about 24 inches at this point in the winter season, and the bulk of our moisture that helped us with the drought came as heavy rain over the Christmas holiday.

We can’t forget about the temperatures. As I write this under the full moon’s light, the outside air temp is 36 degrees F. The forecast for the next few days is for temperatures to be almost into the 60s, with a slight chance of snow later in the week.

The ground is not frozen, the trees are about to be budding, and our winter is just one that has everyone saying after last winter, we needed this.

So, what does all this mean for the upcoming spring season? Nothing. El Nino will continue to mess up all the forecasts and change the weather for the next several months, if not for the rest of the year, from our typical weather.

This week, the multi-hour-a-day work to review, verify, and then take down video pirates on Youtube and META (Facebook and Instagram) continues to consume a huge part of my working day. So much so that we just created a standard reply form letter to send to everyone, but it is more focused on the international video pirates who never thought they would get caught, and outside of just shutting them down, there is not much legal action we can take against them.

The form letter is a legal version to reply to them saying you f’d up, go f yourself and f off, you ripped us off, for pretty much everyone outside of the United States that cries that we took our content. For those inside the United States, I’m putting together a list for the attorney to start to go after to sue them. The piracy just for the hurricane footage is so bad that we even caught an attorney using our footage in their advertising campaigns, and when we confronted them, they said they had no idea… Yeah sure… they are talking to our attorney now.

Don’t get me started on all the Middle Eastern accounts that are ripping off Bryan Snider and Mike Oblinski’s time-lapse work of the Clouds and Deserts to remake some religious video. The ironic part is that they are stealing videos to promote their religion, which has very strict rules about stealing. I know, I can’t make this up. Well, we just shut them down, several dozen a day just from about three of their videos alone.

It is funny when people have lost their Facebook or Instagram channels and have threatened to sue us, but when we ask them for the license to use our work and to have their lawyer contact us, they just storm off mad and pissed that they got caught and their free ride is now done. We have had a couple of American-based Youtubers that we caught using material, and they have come back and paid a retroactive license to get their productions back into compliance and back online. It is not cheap, but they did want their channels back online and were willing to pay.

Pay? How much? When you consider a video for something these days ranges from $75.00 to $150.00 PER SECOND with a 15 second base for long format usage which is anything over ten minutes long, that is a $2,250.00 in footage that someone is using if they lift top shelf hurricane footage. Now if you consider advertising rates for the top shelf footage at $250.00 per second with a ten second base for a limited time and area usage (local TV market and 3-6 months or longer) because the usage of our material could be also considered an endorsement of your product or service, that is $2,500.00 in footage. Factor in a settlement of three times the original rate for being caught being stupid, that is $7,500.00 to settle before you get dragged into court. Stealing video is not worth it with all of the tools now to scan the internet.

Then their are those who say “Those prices are insane, we can get footage much cheaper from the royalty free websites.” Yes, you can, but is the footage that is on those sites actually legit? We have had to go after many different royalty-free websites over the years because others have taken our footage and uploaded it as their own footage. They stole our work, resold it as their own, pocketed the money, and when caught, they just vanished and left the royalty-free site and their clients, who we caught using the footage, in a lot of trouble. It has happened and probably will happen again.

And for the fans that just want to share something, you see, it is so easy to share a video on your social media page or even your website like this, but not host the video. Below is a funny video but it is only an embed link, I’m not sharing it.

The above video is hosted on YouTube, the view count is logged on Funny Or Die YouTube channel stats, and any and all advertising revenue goes back to their channel. It is a win-win for everyone. I get to share the video here, but I’m not hosting it, and they have ultimate control over the video, so they can shut it down today or tomorrow and limit its usage, or the other owners of the footage that Funny or Die used can also limit or remove the video from Youtube. Share the link, don’t re-upload!!!

So, how many people have the copyright takedowns impacted? We have received dozens of emails from people in the last few weeks who have lost their Instagram or Facebook channels and are begging to have them restored. Since SCV was late to the game to get on board with the META copyright verification system, unlike our system we have had with Youtube / Google for the last 15 years, that pretty much takes away all the Advertising Revenue from someone and gives that to use for our crews. We have to go through hundreds of videos per day and submit at least one hundred or more a day to be deleted on META alone.

For just this one video from Simon Brewer and Juston Drake of them playing in Hurricane Irma, we have had to submit several thousands of take-down requests just for this video.

Big or Small, we are taking down them all… The latest takedown freakout was someone in the Caribbean who lost their social media channel that had about a million followers, but now META just did the Thanso “Snap Of Disintegration,” then and “POOF” their channel is gone. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the clip from Marvel’s Youtube channel. The character Thanso just snapped his finger and deleted half the population of the universe.

So, if you are reading this and thinking, “I won’t get caught,” yes, yes, you will. AI and copyright verifications are getting better every day.

Some day I will be back out in the field chasing. Last year it was my back and neck injuries that kept me from chasing, this year is working in the office and a weather pattern that is keeping the northern plains in a perfect weather setup for summer time fun where we are on the verge of a drought.

One of the behind the scenes things I have to do at SCV is fight the massive video piracy of our content on social media. Last year SCV was finally approved for the META (Facebook and Instagram) content management system or “CMS”.

What does CMS do for us? Just like the Youtube CMS that we (SCV) have been part of since it was pretty much created by Google to help copyright holders fight the piracy on Youtube, the META CMS does the same across the META platforms. It digitally fingerprints your video and then searches for other videos that match the fingerprint to let us know about a possible video pirate.

In the last six months of using the META CMS platform, unlike the Youtube platform where we have a huge footprint, we needed to start from scratch on META. I did not think it would be that bad since the main video piracy revenue was from Google Adsense. Wow, I was wrong. Although we are still pushing our content to META to be reviewed, the number of Facebook and Instagram accounts that we have found just downright stealing our content is sickening.

How bad is the video piracy on Meta? While we only have a fraction of our content on Meta, we started with our most popular videos, and the results were pretty much terrifying. Just for one example, the Hurricane Irma video from Simon and Juston:

Just this one video, shows 7,388 total matches and of that, 4,243 still need to be removed. That means I have had to remove over 3,100 + pirated copies off of the Meta platform alone for this video and still have 4,200+ to take down.

Thank that is insane? Last week I found a law firm that was was using SCV footage in their advertising and you could clearly see that they ripped off the footage since our watermark was still in the video. I talked to our attorney and they are dealing with that one now.

So what, people are just using and sharing your content? Really? They are taking away views that should be coming to our crews and the SCV channels to promote our work. It is so bad that I recently had someone call me and threaten to sue me for taking down their Social Media pages because their pages had our stolen material and that they were “entitled” to use our footage under fair use when they were promoting a product and using our material for clickbait. Yes, I asked for their attorney’s name and number just to speed up the process and was told to F#(( Off.

This policing of the video content is becoming a full-time job on top of my normal job of working in the field and working on rights and clearances. I’m hoping to outsource it soon as I’m still trying to recover from the loss of work from last year dealing with the accident and spending most of my time trying to get my back to where it was before I was run off the road the truck losing its breaks.

Well, enough ranting, what else have I been up too? Well, not much, since I got out of the groove for the most part with shooting video last year due to the wreck and rehab, winter was kind of trying to get back on the horse so to speak. I did make it out for the several amazing Aurora Borealis shows this spring but timing for chasing severe has been way off or the weather is just not happening up here.

Here are some of the time lapse videos that I produced over the the past few Aurora events.

I’m kind of bummed that this version pretty much was ghosted on Youtube, compared to my fast edit the night of the solar storm. This edit has a lot more production work put into post-production.

And yes, I even was able to see them on the massive solar storm when I was in Iowa for the Iowa NWA conference this spring. I was able to drive back to the north and find a perfect spot in the middle of a wind farm and get a time-lapse for a play on words “Solar Wind Farm” theme. I noticed that I rushed the production and was not on my A Game for this one due to the lack of time I had been out using my cameras much over the last year. I was able to correct the faults and make it work for the video above based on what I messed up on the video below.

Well it is late, Laura has one more day of school before summer break, time to get some rest people and back at it tomorrow. I’m hoping to be out chasing next week but not sure if the weather is going to cooperate. We shall see.

Some might say, wow, Doug you have finally updated your page. Yeah, the last year was pretty insane. I was knocked out for most of last year with back issues and focusing on health and pain b.s. from getting wrecked in January of 2022. That stuff took a lot out of me where I could not chase due to the pain and headaches.

Well, I’m back and ready to get back into the chasing game this spring as long as my back is not spaz’ing out like last year.

I actually just got back in from watching the Auroras here in St Cloud. I’m processing the video but I just wanted to share this photo. It is late and I need some sleep, I’ll post more this weekend and a recap of the last year of what I have been and not been doing.