Environment

A Gorgeous, Dreamlike Tribute to San Francisco's Fog

Step into a world of ghostly shapes and meditative music with Hey Karl.
Dann Petty

If you live in San Francisco you hear a lot about Karl messing up your commute and making you wet. He’s not some dude snarling traffic by crashing into fire hydrants, but the city’s iconic fog, supposedly named by a Twitter parodist after the lonely giant in Tim Burton’s Big Fish.

Karl can be a soupy nuisance for commuters, but San Francisco wouldn’t be complete without his dreamlike, transcendent qualities. Thanks to Dann Petty, they’re now on glorious display in Hey Karl, a moody, glitchlike short that shows how Pacific moisture can imbue the land with the dark beauty of a Kurosawa film.