Sometimes when I’m out talking with people, the question comes up about how I got started as a science writer or planetarium show producer or got my interest in astronomy. Answering all of those would require a lengthy retelling of my life up to this point, which might be interesting over a few beers, but in a blog would be… well…lengthy. So, let’s select one of the above. How about…. planetarium show producer?
It’s really Mark’s fault. Back when we were in college he decided to pursue music composition using a Moog synthesizer. After a couple of years of patch cords and multi-tracking, he’d succeeded in some interesting pieces of music that sounded vaguely spacy and ambient. Then, we both heard that the university was building a new planetarium, and the next thing we knew, Mark had gone over to the construction site with a cassette tape in hand. He and the technical producer, a fellow named Jim Sharp, sat in Mark’s car listening to the music on the tape deck. One thing led to another and Mark ended up being the in-house composer and soundtrack producer for their planetarium shows for several years.
I got interested in doing planetarium work about that time, but really didn’t have an entry to it until a couple of years later, when we’d both left the university and formed a company called Loch Ness Monster Productions (later shortened to Loch Ness Productions) to market his music. I saw a pretty awful show in a planetarium (not to be named) and said, “By golly, I could do better than that!” And, Mark (who had been successfully selling albums to all and sundry and was looking for a new challenge) said, “Well, write it and we’ll produce it!”
Gulp.
So, I did. And a career writing planetarium shows was born. In the intervening [mumble, mumble] years I’ve written 35 shows, not just for us at Loch Ness Productions, but also for clients around the world. It’s a unique medium; I had to learn to “paint the dome” with words and vivid word pictures; not an easy task in a world that’s cued to TV and movie aspect ratios for education and entertainment.
What about the music, you ask? Well, simple. Mark’s produced seven albums of music, which you can learn more about (including cool audio clips) at: Geodesium. He actually has many more hours of music he’s produced, some of which will show up on albums in the near future. He has fans around the world and Amazon.com actually manages to sell his albums in satisfying numbers! His latest album, Stellar Collections is one of the best-sellers, which is very gratifying. Of course he also sells them through the website, where we also offer planetarium shows and related products.
So composing isn’t his only schtick, just as writing planetarium shows isn’t my only gig. Mark also produces shows—well, we both do. In fact, our recent HUBBLE Vision show is the first one I’ve been the main producer on— meaning that I wrote it, hired the narrator, chose the images, edited the narration (I didn’t produce the soundtrack—that’s still Mark’s bailiwick), and when we produced the video version of it, I worked on the video programming along with Mark, making key decisions about image placement, animations, etc. Mark was there every step of the way, since he’s also produced shows (more than I have, actually), so I wasn’t totally on my own. It was a true team experience. The payoff was watching our show as it premiered during the recent planetarium meeting in Valencia, Spain. Darned pretty it was and I was really proud of our team’s work (we have two employees who also contributed their talents to the overall production, and we were aided by several other companies (among them Sky-Skan Incorporated, and Evans & Sutherland Corporation) who provided useful production tools.
I think every writer should have experience of producing his/her work at least once. It opens your eyes to a lot of possibilities, and once in a while you find at least one cherished idea blown to pieces by ugly reality. If you’re good, you’ll roll with the punches and learn from the experience. And that’s what makes this fun!
Category Archives: writing
Is the Universe Like A Box of Chocolates?
A while back I got an email from a student who wanted to make a career in science writing. Among the questions she asked, she wanted to know how I decided what topics to write about. Science writing is sort of like getting a huge box of candy (no, I’m not going to make a Forrest Gump comparison here). The cosmos presents a lot of things to us that are like chocolate-covered lumps. You just have bite into them to find out what they are. I never know what flavor I’ve got in a given topic until I bite into it.
Some topics grab my attention because they’re hot and happenin’ — for example, a press release about a discovery in another galaxy comes my way and it spurs a story. Sometimes I get a commission to write about a specific topic, like an article I did for Sky & Telescope about gravitational lensing. The same thing happens with planetarium shows, although the last one I did for a client outside of Loch Ness Productions was actually about the universe itself. As you can imagine, it was pretty broad. The producer basically presented me with 20 minutes of science visualization and said, “Here, write us a story about the cosmos.” So, I did.
Books are kind of a different story, if only because I figure out what I want to cover in a book, think about how it will be illustrated, and then I propose it to a publisher. If they like it, they bite on the proposal. Visions of the Cosmos grew out of my interest in sharing the universe with readers and showing it in as many wavelengths as astronomers study it in. Jack shared that interest with me, and so we went to work sifting through great pics that would either illustrate what we wanted to say or give us a new and interesting way to write about hot topics in astronomy. There are millions of great images out there, taken in every part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and each one has a story to tell about how the universe works, how it came into being and where it’s evolving to. Unfortunately, as Jack and I point out in our preface, we can’t possibly publish all the pictures, and choosing from the many excellent science images that came our way was a delightful, if frustrating task. We ultimately settled on 187 or so images that would help tell the story, and off we went.
There are more stories out there in science than you can possibly imagine. Which is great — they’re wonderful fodder for me, for my planetarium shows and books, and for all the future science writers who follow the stories of the cosmos.