How to become a Titan Storm Chaser

Tornado Titans is a loose association of talented storm chasers, photographers, artists, videographers, filmmakers, etc. that have an unbelievably huge passion for the sky. We exist as a group in order to more widely promote each other’s work and to promote the unbelievable power and beauty of our planet. As such, we are always looking for talented people to join us and partner with us to share unbelievably awesome content with a lot of awesome people!

To become a part of Tornado Titan Storm Chasing is a symbol that signals you are affiliating with a top brand in weather to deliver severe weather media to an audience who craves it like no other audience. To put it lightly: we don’t just allow anyone into our fraternity.

This isn’t a shot at anyone, it’s not a claim of superiority: there are other great artists and chasers out there. We just want to partner with talented people with unbelievable passions for the sky.

Over the past couple of years, we have built our brand on making every inch of our name signify quality as best we can, from our videos to our pictures to our website — we do not do anything half-hearted. We expect anyone waving the Titan banner on any level to be just as passionate and just as serious about the mission of extreme weather documentation and observation as we are — we want people who are truly passionate about the sky and sharing their quality work of documenting the sky to others.

Becoming a part of Tornado Titans as a partner chaser is a loose partnership where you simply get the benefits of a group of very talented people helping to promote your material to a wider audience — and you get the benefits of being associated with a brand that is known for it’s quality. You don’t ever give away any copyright rights or content ownership rights, you simply allow your material to be shown on TT branded social media and on websites. You become a part of our team, and most importantly you become someone who will have their material shown to a large and growing audience. You can continue building your own brand as well, or you can go all in and just chase as a Titan, we’re fine with either!

What is the Partnership Program with Tornado Titans?

What the partnership program is, in the simplest terms is a content sharing and promotion agreement where storm chasers/photographers provide content for the Tornado Titans YouTube channel, social media, and website on a non-exclusive basis in exchange for free promotion, content sharing, and other odds and ends. We have worked hard to build up a large audience thus far for extreme weather content and we’re going to keep working on building that audience up. We aren’t guaranteeing fame or fortune, but we are guaranteeing this is the most fair way to share in everything with us and to work with other chasers outside of our core group from the OKC/Norman area.

What are the requirements?

If you think you are interested in becoming a part of the Titan fraternity, here are a list of things we look for in prospective prospective new chasers:

You have to display a working knowledge and passion about extreme weather. If you do not understand what a triple point is, what bulk shear is, or how exactly boundary interactions work with Supercells — we probably don’t have much to talk about. Fair warning.
You have to have three different years worth of documented extreme weather intercepts that are successful. You have to be able to show us these via YouTube or some other video sharing site and photography site. We are not looking for flash in the pan chasers, we want dedicated, long-term, passionate, and successful chasers!
Your video and pics have to impress us. Serious. We are after good quality here. We are looking for people who know how to frame and shoot in a way that shows the beauty of the atmosphere like few can. It’s that simple. We want impressive material.
You have to live in an area favorable for severe weather. Thus, if you live in Oregon or Idaho, we probably don’t have much to talk about. If you, say, lived in Arizona and loved photographing the Monsoon…well we do have something to talk about.
You need to be able to chase pretty regularly. We know life gets in the way, we don’t support the ‘chase anything and everything’ method of chasing because it’s both unrealistic and quite honestly unfruitful. In fact, we promote chasing smart and chasing practical. However, if you only chase a couple of times a year, it’s probably best you do not apply.
If you aren’t on any combination of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram, Tout, YouTube or Vimeo…then you need to be if you are still reading at this point. We require all chasers to maintain a social media presence across the major platforms of Facebook and Twitter at the very least.
Lastly, we want you to be a cool and trustworthy person. We sound like we’re pretty strict and hard liners, but in reality we like the feel of the crew and our group we have and we are not going to just accept anyone, especially if you are prone to putting off extremely shady vibes. We are a very laid back and chill group of guys, we expect the same from anyone looking to join. Chasing is our hobby, chasing is our passion — chasing isn’t a sport and it isn’t a popularity contest. If you are into competing or into being more popular than the other guy, you probably don’t have a place here.

What content are you looking for?

It’s simple: extreme weather or sky media. We want photos and videos from your chases and cool sky moments. We’ll post photos on our social media and website and we’ll embed your YouTube or Vimeo videos on both as well. If you want, you can submit chase logs onto the site too — we’re going to give everyone access to do that. We don’t want to hold anything back. No weather event is too small or big! We want to show the sky off. We’re an artist collective, so showing off your work is what we want to do most. It helps everyone.

Do I lose any rights?

NO. NO. NO. The agreement you would sign would be simple: we get non-exclusive rights to publish anything you give us into perpetuity and your links will be displayed alongside that video forever. Seriously. We won’t broker your video, we won’t sell your video to people, that’s not our job or our intention in any way. We have gotten inquiries about partner video before from networks and every time we point them to you so you can handle those requests how you want. You retain all of your copyrights and all of your distribution rights outside of us. From your point of view, you just agree to let us show the work you provide for us to show. It’s that simple.

Will I have to change how I chase or shoot?

Heck no! We are going to encourage everyone to shoot to be on camera a bit more to get our audience to know you a bit. That’s a no brainer to make everyone as best as possible, but we seriously want you to just do what you do. Chase how you want, be as loud or calm as you want on camera. The ONLY thing we ask is to keep your language clean because we do pride ourselves in keeping our videos very family friendly and work safe. You won’t hear anyone screaming expletives the minute you open up our videos. We like that.

Do I have to plaster Tornado Titans stuff everywhere?

We do require you post a link to our site on your site, and we do require you display some type of Tornado Titans insignia on your chase vehicle, but that is the bare minimum.

How Long Are Agreements?

You sign on for an indefinite period of time. Basically, the agreement lasts until either of us says it’s no longer lasting. So if you want to just do it for a few months or forever…either works.

Ok, so what about money? There’s a catch there right?

Like we said, we are guaranteeing neither fame nor fortune. But what we are guaranteeing is a more than fair split of revenue on any products you provide to us for display in our store. You keep 90% of everything you make with us from your products in our store. That is the only monetary transaction we will have as the rest is up to you and your control!

How am I promoted?

This is a key part of the whole partnership agreement, so it’s worth noting a couple of things. Again, we guarantee neither fame nor fortune — people will like/follow/visit you based upon your content and how you present yourself. We will include your link on Tornado Titans on every page on the right sidebar and/or footer, we will also have your links on every single piece of content posted about you or your chases. Also, we are working on a profile page for our chasers, and we’ll have your profile on there with relevant links. From there, it all depends on audience reaction. We aren’t going to guarantee you’re on your way to 50,000 likes, we are going to guarantee your stuff will be seen by a lot of people. That’s all we can guarantee!

What are your goals?

This is the most important question because I think it’ll really help you focus in on what exactly the Partnership Program with Tornado Titans really is — a content and promotional partnership to help promote your work to more people. The end goal is to basically show off more great content from a select group of chasers from around the world. We will always have a size limit on how many people we allow in to keep the groups size manageable and to make the promotional aspects worthwhile. We are not here to steal content, to sell content, or any of that stuff as already outlined — the beginning and end of our partnership rests in posting your content on our web destinations with your relevant links.

If you were looking for a reason to join, I’d say the big one is that I’m extremely confident in our future plans at Tornado Titans and I see a future where our website is visited extremely frequently by just about anyone looking for cool extreme weather content. I’ve been doing Online Content management for well over a decade and manage a few sites, some of which receive over one million visitors a month each and every month. The end goal with Tornado Titans is to have it become a site like that, with a ton of traffic with people wanting to visit to simply see cool stuff about the atmosphere and sky. Thus, if you want in on that mission and want to try to help promote yourself better, it’s hard to beat the deal we are offering, as we’re not after much more than showing off your work to the audience we’ve built over the past few seasons. The only thing we’ll both be out at the end of this is time. - Chris Sanner, Tornado Titans Co-Founder

How do I apply?

Ok STILL interested? Well you rock and we want to hear from you STAT. Keep in mind we may not always be looking for new chasers but it’s always a good idea to send your info in if you quality. Here’s what we want:

Your Name.
Your Current Location.
Years Chasing
Link to Videos and Pictures of your intercepts
What Video Camera/Stills Camera Do You Own?
Your Social Media Addresses
Your Brands Address and Social Media Info as well if you have one
How often do you chase?
What is your chase region/range?
What do you really want to accomplish by partnering with us?
Why should we really let you partner with us (aka impress us)?

Gather all of this, and send it to us at admin@tornadotitans.com. If we like you we’ll respond pretty quickly. If not, we’ll likely kind of give you a generic denial letter of thanks and perhaps some tips to improve for next time (at least we’re honest).