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.