NEW RESELLER: SCISS

We're pleased to welcome Sweden-based SCISS, makers of Colorspace (and AVI's OmniView) Uniview-based fulldome systems, as a reseller of Loch Ness Productions shows!

NEW SHOW: MUSICA — Why is the Universe Beautiful?

Why am I inspired by beauty?

Have you ever wondered just why the universe is filled with such beautiful stars, planets, and galaxies? Or how the simple notes and harmonies of a piece of music can touch your soul? How a sunflower, a seashell, and a spiral galaxy are all related?

MUSICA — Why is the Universe Beautiful? is a gorgeous fulldome show from Hiromitsu Kohsaka of Live Company Ltd. in Japan. It uses the concepts of harmony and harmonics to show us how math and physics are united in music and nature.

We're pleased to make this artistic, entertaining, and educational presentation available in English to fulldome theaters everywhere. It's a show to nourish your artistic senses, renew your interest in the cosmos, and delight you with the links between physics, math, art, and music.

Use your theater to teach math, physics, and music as well as astronomy! This show brings a new, imaginative, and cross-disciplinary way to present these topics to your audiences. Music and art students will automatically understand what Musica is saying to us: that art, science, and mathematics all combine to open our eyes to the beauty of the universe. From school students to family groups, all will enjoy and remember this unique way to see the art and beauty of the universe.

As always, you can find trailers, full-length show previews, pricing, and online ordering on our Web pages for the show. Come explore the cosmos with MUSICA — Why is the Universe Beautiful?

Dinosaurs at Dusk Short Version Preview

We've posted the online preview for Dinosaurs at Dusk — the 29 minute version, so you can compare it to the 41 minute version.

Five Decades of Geodesium!

We were looking at the Geodesium page on iTunes, and it says "Years Active: '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s". In other words, Geodesium has been creating music in each of the last five decades!

To celebrate, we've made a retrospective video, from the first eponymous 1977 album to the most recent Music From Infinity, and we've posted it on YouTube. You can check it out from our Geodesium home page.

Happy flashbacks!

The official SpacePark360: Infinity trailer is ready!

We've posted previews for all nine rides from the upcoming SpacePark360: Infinity project, and now the trailer is ready. You can catch it on YouTube — in HD! Check it out! It's also available in Flash here on our Web site, if your nanny filter blocks YouTube! And it's on our Vimeo channel too.

If all goes well, we're looking at a target release for the full show sometime next month!

Prepare for more exhilaration!

Announcing: A NEW Geodesium album: Music From Infinity

Ro-o-o-ckin'!!!

Just when you thought Geodesium's mind-tripping music project for SpacePark360 couldn't get any more eXtreme, we're back with another album of energetic, hard-hitting rhythms and beats.

Like the fulldome show rides it accompanies, Music from Infinity gives your ears a delirious auditory romp across the solar system and beyond. Spin through a polar vortex, explore the new frontier, enjoy a retro trip to the Moon, and punch the ramjet on the ion drive as you head for alien worlds.

Music from Infinity captures the breathless excitement of the updoming SpacePark360: Infinity show, set for release this fall. The new album features the soundtrack music, composed exclusively for this show, mixed without the ride noise, crashes and sound effects.

Geodesium Music from Infinity — it's an audio trip of a lifetime! Available as both disc and download.

Coming soon: SpacePark360: Infinity

Okay, we've posted previews for all nine rides from the upcoming SpacePark360: Infinity project.

You can now watch/listen to:

• Skylab - Earth
• Arctic Coaster - Earth
• Scrambler - Moon
• Ice Slide - Europa
• Anti-Freeze - Enceladus
• Cronus - Saturn Rings
• Crystal Coaster - Asteroid Interior
• Alien Fallout - Exoplanet
• Moebius Loop - Sun

We're currently finalizing the surround sound mixes, while Dome3D finalizes the finishing touches on the 4k frames. So watch for the show's release later this summer. We know it's been a long time coming, but we're sure you'll agree the wait will be worth it!

Prepare for more exhilaration!

Losing the Dark now available in Italian

That makes fourteen languages so far, for our free-to-download show! And there are plans for creating even more.

Check it out!

Light Years From Andromeda now available in Italian

Through the efforts of our customer Luciano Bittesini, we are pleased to make this soundtrack available to our fulldome show customers.

We've posted previews of the trailer to audition.

New SpacePark360: Infinity previews

We've posted previews for more rides from the upcoming SpacePark360: Infinity project. Hooray, seven down, only two more to go!

You can now watch/listen to:

• Arctic Coaster - Earth
• Skrambler - Moon
• Anti-Freeze - Enceladus
• Cronus - Saturn Rings
• Crystal Coaster - Asteroid Interior
• Alien Fallout - Exoplanet
• Möbius Strip - Sun

We're all excitedly looking forward for the full show to be finished!

IT'S HERE! Dinosaurs at Dusk - The Origins of Flight

Dinosaurs at Dusk has been a long time in production, but it's ready to ship at last!

For those of you looking for a show about dinosaurs, geological time periods, and the origins of flight, this is the show for you! Paleontologists and biologists have long known the link between birds and dinosaurs, and this fascinating fulldome show shares that link. It tells an imaginative tale of an adventurous young woman and her scientist father who transport through time to Earth's prehistoric ages. They end up in the Cretaceous Period and play witness to the impact event that played a part in the death of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

Dinosaurs at Dusk won the Jena Fulldome Festival 2013 Award of Excellence for its amazing CGI work and green-screen compositing, character-rich animated sequences and unique storyline. It's sure to be a hit with your audiences!

Head to the Dinosaurs at Dusk Web page for previews and pricing information on the latest addition to the Loch Ness Productions library of fine fulldome movies.

NEW SHOW: Beyond The Arctic Circle

Take a fulldome trek through the Arctic tundra.

Beyond the Arctic Circle is the latest addition to the Loch Ness Productions library of fine fulldome movies.

The first fulldome show from the Benjamin River Productions team, Beyond the Arctic Circle is a fascinating trip to explore the nature and wildlife of Earth's northernmost regions. Shot at 5K resolution with a custom-made camera rig, this scientific and cultural expedition shows us the lands of the north, through the eyes of a grandfather and his curious grandson.

The journey begins with a refreshing sled ride through the forests, drawn in the traditional way by husky dogs. The Arctic tundra unfolds before your eyes as the show immerses you in a landscape most people never get to see. At journey's end, the northern lights appear in all their glory, and we learn the ancient Sami legend of the mythical fox whose tail sparks these mysterious auroral displays.

Beyond the Arctic Circle is a cross-cultural delight, teaching about the legends of the northern people, the geography and botany of the land, including a look at Earth science, all woven into a unique and unforgettable story. If you're looking for a video that covers these topics, and fits in several important educational niches, then don your parka and head to the Beyond The Arctic Circle Web page for previews and pricing information.

2014 IMERSA Summit presentations

We're back from the successful IMERSA meeting in Denver, where Mark gave three presentations. We've posted them as articles in our Reference library.

First up: what's become an almost annual tradition — Mark's State of the Dome Address. This time around, his talk was a bit more condensed than in previous years, but there's plenty of food for thought provided, as he reviews how our profession is faring in these times of economic stress.

Then, in two panel discussions, he offered some insights about how we work.

At conferences like IMERSA, instead of passing around business cards, attendees are often seen passing around hard drives; we picked up a couple ourselves. Here at Loch Ness Productions, we get in hard drives from show producers on a regular basis — and we have to be organized, donning our IT officer hats, when dealing with the massive amounts of data.

In Ingestion Indigestion, we discuss what exactly we want to see on the hard drives we take in... and what we don't!

Then, in Using After Effects to make fulldome movies for distribution, we discuss what exactly we do with the frames and audio on those hard drives once they're ingested.

You don't need a library card to check out all the resources in our Reference library. Enjoy!

Losing the Dark now available in Cantonese!

That makes thirteen languages so far, for our free-to-download show! And there are plans for creating even more.

Check it out!

New pricing for Albedo Fulldome shows

We've received the 2014 price list from our producer colleagues in Barcelona, and there are now some great savings and deals we can offer.

For nearly all sizes, prices have been reduced from last year — some by nearly 50%!

And we're now able to provide a special quantity discount — buy licenses of equal length for two or more Albedo Fulldome shows, and get a 20% discount on the total!

We created the English script adaptation, narration, and soundtracks for their "A - B - C" show titles: Astronomy: 3000 Years of Stargazing, Birth of the Solar System, and Chronicle of a Journey to Earth.

Go forth and explore Albedo Fulldome's shows!

Production studio upgrade, part 2: The PixelDome

We finally got around to appending a few pix of the current projector and computer configuration in our production studios dome. They're at the bottom of the PixelDome page.

Here's last year's news, if you haven't been here for a while and want to catch up.

Mark C. Petersen, webmaster