We’ve been absolutely buried working on our new show so none of us has gotten the chance to post anything on the blog lately. Recently, however, I was purusing the Dome-L listserv and came across an interesting post by Jim Sweitzer from Science Communications Consultants, a firm that consults on planetarium planning and programming. He was responding to a question by Mr. Huseynov at the new planetarium in the city of Baku (Azerbaijan?) and gave some good tips for new fulldome system owners:

1. Don’t invest in a major in-house production team. You should be cautious in launching into major full-dome video productions. They can be quite expensive produce at times and assembling a production team is challenging and difficult to sustain. Even the most well funded planetariums have difficulties keeping production teams going. If you really need a show that you can’t purchase from a vendor, then hire an experienced producer who has a good track record. It will be cheaper in the long run.

2. Invest in good pre-rendered shows: We are in a better place than we were years ago because there are numerous excellent, pre-rendered full-dome shows available. You couldn’t afford to produce any of them for any where near what they cost to lease. If you choose wisely, you will be able to use them for a long time.

3. Invest in your operating and presenting staff: Rather than try and develop a production team, I might suggest that you develop the skills of yourin-house staff to really be able to use the real time software that came with your system. All the vendors’ software is now quite mature and sophisticated. Mastering it well and also making sure your presenters are well versed in the science will be the best “production” path you can take. This means making sure they attend the vendors trainings and also get to visit good analog planetariums around the world. Make sure they can also talk about the latest subjects your audiences see in the news too.

4. Couple pre-rendered shows with live, real-time session: I continue to find the most effective and lively planetarium offerings. I see around the world are ones that join a great pre-rendered show with a live session. Give your audiences a one-hour experience that includes contact with a knowledgeable presenter and you will please your audiences.

5. Work hard on marketing your new planetarium. This cannot be neglected if you want to be successful, especially with a new and innovative theater. “Framing” is a term used in America to characterize, in this case, your planetarium. I’m not sure what is appealing in Baku, but one “frame” that I think can work well with new digital planetariums is to characterize them as “space exploration simulators.” They are ultimately based upon flight simulator technology. Make your audiences think that you are going to fly them around outer space. This type of approach is much better than characterizing them as “visualization theaters” or “immersive experiences.” I might get in trouble with some with this opinion, but I feel that the latter two frames are too abstract and un-engaging for typical audiences. Whatever you do, make sure people understand it’s not simply a big round cinema.

I think Jim’s made some excellent points. (However, if Morehead listened to the first point, I’d be out of a job right now) I especially agree with point number four – coupling pre-rendered shows with live shows. As great as the pre-rendered shows are, you can really get a crowd excited and engaged with a view of the night sky and a short hop through the universe with real-time software such as DigitalSky or Uniview.

What I’m curious about is characterizing new fulldome theaters as “space exploration simulators” as opposed to “immersive experiences.” Has anyone else tried this?

Our first fulldome short, “Jeepers Creepers,” will have its world premiere at the Fulldome UK 2011 festival in mid-March. We’re pretty psyched because it will be the first time anyone will see the short outside of folks from Morehead. I won’t give away the premise, suffice to say that if you’re not yet afraid of insects, you might be after it’s over. Pete wrote a short blog post about it when we were in the development phase to give you a little sense of the plot.

Fulldome UK 2011 is being held at the Thinktank Science Museum in Birmingham and has some interesting dome content lined up and some great looking sessions such as shooting with a RED for the dome by a pro steadicam operator, “Storytelling in the Dome” by NSC Creative and “Adventures in Fulldome cinemetography” by Phil Mayer from GaiaNova.  Who wants to buy me a plane ticket?

We’re looking for a local (North Carolina – Triangle area) Maya character animator for a 3 month freelance gig starting January 15th. We’d like someone who is/has:

fluent in Autodesk Maya

facial animation and lip sync skills

solid understanding of animation principals (Arcs, Anticipation, Timing, etc.)

open to changes in direction when needed

team player

detail oriented

If you have all that and rigging experience, it’ll put you over the top.

If you’re interested, please email me at jayheinz@unc.edu with a copy of your resume and a link to your portfolio.  You’ll need to work on-site in our secret lair, so brush up on your ninja skills.

With each production we learn a little more about the trends in the industry. One thing that has made itself clear is that tilted domes require consideration when picking the sweet spot for viewing fulldome video. You want the bulk of your content to show up in or around this sweet spot. If something is produced for a flat dome, the sweet spot would be about 45 degrees up from the spring line, and the horizon just visible around 5 degrees. This works nicely to create a natural feeling as viewers sit back and experience the content in a flat dome.

However, if you take that same content and place it in a tilted dome the audience feels as though they’re perpetually looking down a hill, and creates a kind of mental confusion that breaks the immersion.

In order to resolve this problem, we shift everything up about 15-20 degrees. This creates a natural feeling for most tilted domes, and doesn’t disrupt the viewing experience of flat dome viewers when they sit back in tilted chairs.

To help us keep this in mind we created an overlay to use while viewing our animatics to make sure we don’t stray too far from the ideal sweet spot and framing of content.

Check out the new trailer for our newest fulldome show Magic Tree House®: Space Mission. We’ll be debuting it at the Imiloa Film Festival in Hawaii in October.

Since its debut, the beloved Magic Tree House® book series has been a perennial best-seller. Published in 32 countries and 28 languages, the series focusing on the exploits of the brother-sister team of Jack and Annie has sold more than 64 million books in North America alone.

Now, UNC Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, in partnership with authors Will and Mary Pope Osborne, brings the blockbuster Magic Tree House® franchise to fulldome theaters for the first time ever.

In Magic Tree House® Space Mission, a mysterious “M” sends the intrepid Jack and Annie on a fun-filled journey to discover the secrets of the Sun, Moon, planets, space travel and more. Aligned with early elementary information skills learning objectives, this beautifully-produced show is a winner with Magic Tree House® fans of all ages and school audiences alike. Audiences age 5-10. Running Time: 30 minutes.

An original UNC Morehead Planetarium and Science Center production, written by Will Osborne, co-author of Space, the non-fiction companion and research guide to the Magic Tree House® book Midnight on the Moon.

As most of you know there are not very many production tools out there specifically designed for us Fulldome folk. So often times we have to get creative with what we have. Early on in my experiments with working in Fulldome, I created this little project. (download AE project here).

It takes the 3d space of After Effects and funnels it through several different cameras and then in a master comp stitches them together using the After Effects plug-in from Sky-Skan, DomeXF. I’m sure it can be done with the AE FullDome plug-in, just some of the settings will be different.

At the root is a 3d Scene.

This one scene is placed into 5-6 comps, then each of those comps gets a different camera.

The key to remember is to check the “Collapse Transforms” mind sweeper looking button on the layer in each camera comp.

These are the settings for each camera in each comp. Each Comps Dimensions should be 2048×2048 if you’re trying to create a full 4k final output. You could make them smaller, ie, 512×512 to make a 1k… as long as they’re a 1:1 ratio.

Now you just point the cameras in their respective comps based on these settings.

Now that you’ve got  your 5-6 different views of the AE3d Scene, you move those into 1 master stitch.

Each comp now a layer gets the DomeXF plug-in, with their respective settings, and then you’ve got a fisheye image of the 3d space in after effects.

Now something of note, I haven’t gotten the Down camera to work with the DomeXF, but I believe it works with the FullDome Plug-in.

I’ve recently started playing with some expressions so I can link the attributes of the DomeXF settings on each layer so I can adjust the dome tilt, though if you’re using the FullDome Plug-in that’s that’s pretty easy. You just link the dome tilt field  on each of the layers to either a slider, or to one common layer.

Hope this is helpful.

As the storyboarding phase is drawing to a close, I thought I’d touch on a couple things that I’ve learned.

Our new show, Solar System Odyssey, is heavily driven by story. Characters are continually interacting with each other, both in dialogue and action. This brings up challenges that haven’t been issues in shows prior to this one. In previous shows, interactions between the characters had been strictly though dialogue. Many of the voices were heard without seeing exactly who was doing the talking. In our first show, Earth, Moon and Sun, the main character, Coyote, would converse with a narrator that the audience would never see. Coyote could simply reply to the narrator by facing towards the audience. On the other hand, when more than two characters can be seen on screen, all interacting and talking to one another, things were a bit different and sacrifices needed to be made.

One of the great things about the dome is being able to be immersed in the environment. Current best practice would typically say that if you’ve got the dome real estate, use it. However, what we really want to showcase during these segments are the conversations between the characters. The audience needs a focus and we want to discourage their eyes from venturing around. Sure, the inside of the ship may look pretty and the viewer’s eye will want to look around it, but it’s truly a secondary element. We want their eyes focused on the character’s faces and body movements.

What’s all this leading to?

This map I affectionately call the “Dance Chart”.

For each scene I’ve created, I’ve drawn a chart in which I map out the character’s key points in the scene, as well as the location and front direction of the camera. I’ve been very careful to allow for good staging for the characters at most times, and the immersion comes from the deliberate and timed movement of the camera moving through the environment. The audience becomes like a fly on the wall, watching the scene unfold in front of them. While the characters are generally in the front half of the dome the majority of the time, by keeping the camera in near constant moving and framing, an immersive sense is developed and maintained.

When creating a Dance Chart, some key elements to think about are these:

•   An element of focus (Character, Object, Follow the bird)

•   Lots of play with foreground, midground, and background elements

•   Don’t move the camera too fast. Keeping a focus point helps, but only to a certain degree.

The element of focus allows for the camera to move without there being much motion sickness. Having foreground, midground, and background elements shifting and moving helps to sell the environment and reinforce the camera movements. The camera speed should maintain graceful elegance with its motion.

When you want to encourage the audience to look around, keep the camera still or moving slowly and deliberately. It’s our experience that people favor movement that compliments the direction they’re already looking.

We’re smack dab in the middle of storyboarding out our new Solar System show so that means it’s time to start on the audio.  Which is good because I’m tired of sitting back, lighting cigars with flaming $100 bills and laughing manically. First step is to get some scratch tracks of our characters down so when we move on to animatics we can have some idea of timing. It’s also proving to be helpful for us to have an idea of how things will sound and how they should be acted when we get the real voice actors in on the job. In the meantime, we grabbed some great amateur voice over actors from Morehead and let ’em loose on the script:

Jonathan Frederick as Space Captain Jack Larson

Peter Althoff as Billionaire Warren Trout

Carly Apple as Ashley Trout

Jim Kachelries as Beemer the Robot

Laura Walters as Capcom

For the past year, Morehead’s been working with an Artist in Residence, David Colagiovanni, who has been not only creating new content for the dome, but thinking more in-depth about how we use and interact in the dome environment.  David’s a professor in the UNC-Chapel Hill Art Department and we’ve stolen him away to work on dome stuff in his free time.

Last month, he presented his work on the dome to a packed house and we’ve convinced him to stick around for another year and push some of his ideas even further. Meanwhile, we asked one of our multimedia students, Colby Ramsay, to put together a short documentary about David and his work on the dome. And for all you gear heads, yes, he’s using the RED Camera. Check it out:

Conjure the image of a cloud, shouldn’t be too hard… Except now take that white fluffy cloud and try to imagine it “cartoony”, this became a bit more of a challenge. We are going for a non photo-realistic rendering (NPR) style aka Toon Rendering for this next piece. This created a challenge for developing atmospheric effects such as clouds. Bellow are a few of the screen tests we’ve done to determine which look and feel we’ll go with.

This is a digitally created representation of a very real looking set of clouds.

this is a similar, yet slightly altered state of realistic clouds. In it we pushed the fluffy askpects and made them more solid

This is what we are calling “painterly” clouds. He we are playing with what feels like a cloud, even though they don’t look realistic.

This is “cartoony” representation of clouds, that is close in style to the other hard surface elements of the show.

Although the “cartoony”  clouds are the most consistent with the visual style, we are leaning toward the painterly set. The issues that exist with moving through the cartoon clouds would result in hitting  hollow point inside these empty objects. Not to mention they’re rather resource intensive. They contain millions of polygons, that when rendered take up valuable processing time. We also realized with the painterly clouds we want people to feel as though they’re traveling through the familiar into this flat “cartoony” world, and since they feel like a real cloud, they will be accepted as such.