I'm a science writer and editor. I work with clients in the observatory and planetarium community, as well as my own book, web, planetarium, and other projects.
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So, just to finish off the thoughts I started in the previous entry... writing for the dome requires that I conceive of my story in more than the square or rectangular dimensions that most of us are used to in movies and TV. But, there was also another constraint. For the longest time, we could only see the stars on the dome as a "flat" backdrop, much as we do when we step outside and stargaze. This isn't such a bad thing, especially if you want to teach people how to find various stars, constellations, planets, and so forth. But, with the advent of fulldome digital video, suddenly all the databases of stars that scientists work with could be plugged into a computer program and used to take people out through the stars. Add in more databases and suddenly you can travel through galaxy clusters and the large-scale structure of the cosmos. This is 'way more than we used to get in the old days of planetariums, when we were limited to slides of galaxy clusters, for example.
There is some ferment in the planetarium industry about the "old ways" going the way of the dinosaur. It's true. Slide projectors aren't being made by Kodak anymore; nor is much of the film we used to make our slides available. It's a digital video age, and as expensive as the changeover is for those places who are contemplating the leap to fulldome, it's also a leap into methods of doing our jobs that are much different from the "old days."
Today, a planetarian using fulldome video will find him or herself running shows from a variety of producers (such as myself), and likely also wanting to create some of his or her own presentations. All of us planetarium folk who create shows are finding ourselves learning new tricks of the trade: video editing and compositing software, graphics creation packages, and so on. Instead of slaving away over a hot copystand and photographing artwork to make panoramas and all-skies, we're all slaving away in front of computers and learning the true meaning of "babysitting a render" just like the big boys at Pixar and other studios.
So, what does this mean for me as a science writer? Basically, when I set out to write a show these days, I'm finally getting to see my shows on the dome the way I've always pictured them in my mind as I write them, thanks to advances in digital video technology and computerized visual editing and compositing.
As long-time readers know, I write about astronomy and space science in a variety of formats. Of course there are the books and magazine articles, this blog, and the Griffith Observatory exhibits, which I wrote during 2005 and well into 2006. And, in the very near future, I'll be debuting some short video documentaries online for a group of scientists at an observatory near my office.
I also do documentary scripts, mostly for planetariums. That is what I'm best known for among the world's several thousand planetarium professionals. Sometimes in the course of my work, I find myself telling somebody about the planetarium shows I've written. Yep, there have been several dozen of them over the years, and they're something of a unique art form. Mostly this is because the show's action takes place projected on the domed ceiling of a round room. It's a different kind of medium than the big squares/rectangles you see at your local movie houses or in your living room. For one thing, stuff can't go "off screen" or "exit stage left" as you would see in a movie, TV show or in a live play. There's no "off" or "left" in a hemisphere. Oh, you can have stuff go "down" (that is, below the level of the dome") and that's legitimate. Another difference lies in the immersiveness of the dome. You can literally put your audience into a scene, which immediately affects the types and speeds of motion you can use on the dome. There's a lot of experimentation going on these days with just what you can get away with on the dome before you make your audience sick or lose their interest or just simply overwhelm them with the show. And that experimentation has been brought on largely by the advent of fulldome video systems.
Planetarium shows are a hybrid of documentary and immersive entertainment. In the planetarium community, there's always some ferment over how much something is educational versus entertaining, but that debate lacks the teeth it used to have. For one thing, educational programs can be entertaining, given the right mixture of talent and skill among the creators. In the beginning, back before there were slide projectors and video projectors, planetarium folk had a round room with a star projector. They used this space to give lectures, pointing out the various stars and constellations. Before long, somebody thought of adding some music to enhance the mood of the lecture. Then somebody else thought of sticking some slide projectors in the room to show pictures from telescopes, spacecraft, space artists, and other sources. Eventually, planetarium shows divided into "live" vs "taped" presentations, and there were great fermenting hullabaloos over which was better. Turns out that each kind of presentation had/has its strengths, and the wise planetarium person uses them both as appropriate.
Today, the fulldome video presentation is the digital child of the old slide-tape format show. Technology has progressed well enough that you can stretch several hundred to several thousand pixels across a dome. Naturally, all of us who produce shows are embracing this as a way to do ever-better and more exciting shows.
This hasn't changed my scriptwriting goals too much, other than now I can add "documentary fulldome video writer" to my list of marketable skills. And, like everybody else in the planetarium community who is going or has gone to fulldome video (either with or without the accompanying opto-mechanical star projector), I'm having to learn some new skills (video editing and compositing, for one). Planetarium shows have come a long way since the first one I did, which was a slide-tape show about the speed of light. I wonder where they'll go in the future?
Back when I worked at the planetarium (before I went back to grad school), I used to dread the arrival of spring. Not the nice weather or the flowers. But, at the planetarium, spring meant increasing numbers of field trips. Now, the attendance numbers jumping up was good news. We wanted to see that. But, late in the spring, just when we got more attendance, our student helpers and lecturers were smack in the middle of studying for finals and/or getting ready for graduation. So they weren't available to do all the star talks I'd trained them to do.
So, what that meant was the lecturing duties would be divvied up amongst a smaller pool of lecturers, or often enough, it was my sole duty to do them. Some days that's all I did—give lectures to the school groups who came in for star tours and planetarium shows.
Don't get me wrong—a startalk in the planetarium can be a thing of great beauty and a whole lot of fun to do for a lecturer blessed with a good sense of humor and receptive audiences. Two in a row is interesting. Three in a row is starting to take a toll. Doing six or seven in one day is a marathon. That's six or seven HOURS of nonstop talking, answering questions, shepherding the students in and out, taking 10 minutes to gulp down lunch, and hopefully running out for a potty break during a pre-recorded show. So, I'd pace myself, and try to make each show as interesting as possible, but by the end of the day, I was definitely not on top of my game. Back when I taught in the classroom (briefly, early in my career) it was the same way. You spend the day in the classroom, with 20 or 30 kids, tending to every need, including the educational, and by the end of the day it was Miller time!
Still, the kids don't know a planetarium lecturer is tired or talked out or badly need a bathroom break or a cup of coffee. They're so taken by the whole environment of the planetarium and its cool shape and the equipment and the differentness of it all that they don't notice the lecturer's bedragglment late in the day. Which is a good thing. The magic of the dome somehow hides all that.
I was thinking about those days a couple of weeks ago when I was making arrangements to record a couple of narrators for a new set of shows that Mark and I have just released. They're basically pre-recorded star talks for use in fulldome video planetarium systems. I was explaining the concept to one of the narrators, and I told her about my days in the planetarium and just how draining it could be, even though I was totally turned on about teaching under the dome. The memory of that theater experience was part of the impetus for these shows, in a way. Another was a request from a planetarium colleague who had NO staff to help give shows, and he needed a product to help him meet the demand for star shows. So, we created our stargazing show project to provide totally consistent shows that fulldomers can use, regardless of how well-staffed or prepared they are.
I wish I'd had them back in my own halcyon days of lecturing. I could have used them as stand-alones, or coupled them with Q&A sessions, which were some of my favorite times. A Q&A let me sort of "peek" inside the visitors' heads to see what their understanding of astronomy was. They never let me down and a lot of times I got into some really cool conversations with attendees.
Which reminds me of a great star talk I heard at a star party in Ontario one time. It was really late in the evening and a group of us were sitting around one guy's telescope talking about our first visits to planetariums. One of the guys gave a great imitation of a startalk presenter as if he was Dr. Frankenstein's monster. The puns were awful, and we went away with our bellies aching from laughing so hard. But,for me, it was interesting to see that somebody got something out of the star talk, and remembered enough of it to do a credible imitation a few years later. That's the beauty of any star talk—if it touches a person and makes them want to go outside and look up, then the effect is good, no matter how tired the lecturer might be.
One of the listserv mailing lists I read frequently is populated by planetarium folk. As you can imagine, with planetariums being spread across the world and a variety of projector and institution types, the conversations could be pretty widespread in their outreach.
Well, maybe. Lately the discussion has turned to several topics that keep getting revisited:
Pluto is/is not a planet (and why that's good, bad, ugly, or otherwise)
Global warming (why it exists/what to do about it)
How No Child Left Behind affects planetarium facilities
This last one is downright scary, although the other two topics are good for generating lots of sound and fury. No Child Left Behind is a confusing maze of legislation that is supposed to generate (as far as I can tell) a better education in U.S. schools. I don't know how much good it has done because all we seem to read (and talk) about is how it has left many schools with unfunded mandates and generally fuzzy expectations about what it means to test students for what they've learned. In many cases, the law seems to get cited when schools want to reduce unnecessary funding and focus on "the basics."
Okay, you say, that sounds fair, right? Well, maybe. Some listserv participants say that schools are reducing school field trips to the planetarium. This is likely a cost-cutting move to save on fuel prices and cost of bus trips, etc. It is unfortunate, but easily understandable if the district is really strapped for cash. And fuel prices are high all over. But, I suspect that the "focus on basics" argument is thrown in to satisfy some political or otherwise non-educational need.
A planetarium visit is actually quite an educational activity. The students get to learn about astronomy in an environment conducive to it. Since the early 1960s, students have been going to planetariums to learn about astronomy and it seems to have worked. And, astronomy is a science that is a gateway to other sciences; it encompasses people in such varied disciplines as physics, math, computing, biology, chemistry, geology/geophysics, and life sciences. In addition, it has spurred many people to go into careers in science writing, policy, and education.
So, if there's some educational reason why suddenly the planetarium is NOT working as an educational venue, I'd like to see it (and the documented evidence). Because otherwise, what we're really doing by cutting back on trips to the planetarium, zoo, etc. is cutting back on kids' educations in the name of something other than education.
Yes, saving fuel is important. But, there are alternative fuels and methods of transportation. And alternative planetariums that actually travel TO the schools (or reside therein). Several companies make and sell them (you can see lists of planetarium system suppliers here and here) for more details).
Why so adamant about planetariums? After more than 20 years working with and in them, creating more than two dozen shows for such facilities, I've seen first-hand evidence that they work quite well as a learning experience. And, anecdotally, when I talk to scientists at meetings, if I ask them how they got interested in astronomy, a visit to the planetarium is often mentioned as something that spurred them on to study the subject.
I suspect that if planetariums continue to get cut out of the curriculum (whether or not "No Child Left Behind" is cited as a reason, we'll be cutting off our educational noses to spite our faces. And at least in the U.S., we can't really afford to continue dumbing down our kids for political reasons. Particularly in science, where we need more expertise than ever before, not less.
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