Change over Time.. that’s What It’s About

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?