Water for Tea is a movie about a high-tech, high-profile mission called GPM. But the movie seeks to grab viewers’ attention through images of teacups and teapots. What’s going on here? Recognizing the challenge of translating the often arcane, techno-jargon of advanced space-based research to people who may be unfamiliar with that rarefied language, the production team set about devising a world of their own. They needed a way to implicitly relate the political and scientific importance of NASA’s GPM mission without having to delve into its nuts and bolts. The environment they created for the movie established the rules right away. Teacups and a teapot stand in for satellites that will comprise the GPM fleet, as well as for features of the Earth’s fresh-water environment. They sit on an ethereal table in a quiet, meditative space. It’s a visual motif designed to create a relationship between the immense scale of a space-based satellite fleet and individuals on the ground. Thematically, the table acts like the Earth. It is both unpredictable and powerful. As the movie progresses, the table suggests not only a transformable environment, but also a place for contemplation and creation. When a painting appears draped across the table’s surface, we see an artist’s expression of the foliage that fills the space around the table-an expression of the larger world represented by nothing more astounding than ink on paper. We see the Earth as the province of human contemplation and creativity. GPM stands for Global Precipitation Measurement. A multinational endeavor designed to transform human understanding about the water cycle, GPM will be an Earth science research project like no other in history.