At the Peak of the Summit
Last week we attended and participated in the annual IMERSA Summit, held in Denver at the Sie Center and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. It was an incredibly busy gathering, with experts in areas of video production, fulldome hardware, theater management, and data analysis sharing their work with attendees. More than 200 fulldome professionals attended the Summit.
The Nessie/IMERSA Connection
Loch Ness Productions is a founding member of IMERSA and we are strongly supportive of the organization’s strong focus on fulldome content and technology. Mark and I have worked to help organize and support the meetings in the past, and each year we have participated either by giving talks and/or presenting shows. This year’s Summit was no different, and we were also pleased to provide sponsorship for the highly successful “Fiske Night” at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Since Loch Ness Productions compiles and curates the world’s most extensive and accurate databases of fulldome theaters: the Fulldome Theater Compendium, and fulldome shows: the Fulldome Show Compendium, Mark was asked by session chair Michael Daut (of Evans & Sutherland) to give an overview of the state of the dome and the content dome theaters are using. These topics have been of particular interest to IMERSA, and he has worked with IMERSA board members over the years to provide information about domes and shows. Mark’s presentation at this year’s Summit set the stage for in-depth discussions about the future of content and the populations of domes that are in need of fulldome videos.
Mark will be posting the full text and graphics from his IMERSA talks on our reference pages in the very near future. We’ll post here to let you know when they’re available. His insights really provided a lot of food for thought for IMERSA Summit attendees and spurred a great deal of discussion about the future of fulldome content and technology.
We showed our award-winning short program Losing the Dark at the Summit, presented on the Gates dome during one of the evening show sessions. We were quite pleased at the reception and got very good feedback from several attendees who have been showing the presentation on their domes.
Normally, I would offer a scriptwriting/storytelling seminar at the IMERSA Summit, but this year I was on the local organizing committee and responsible for chairing several sessions and wrangling all the media submissions. I decided it would be better to focus on those tasks, and let someone else handle storytelling in the dome. That topic was very well presented by director Paulina Majda, who was responsible for the gorgeous video Dream to Fly from the Copernicus Science Center in Warsaw, Poland. Ryan Wyatt of the California Academy of Sciences also chaired a session on storytelling, and so those topics — which are incredibly vital to our work as fulldome producers — were well covered.
More Summit Doings
During the Summit, attendees saw eight award-winning fulldome shows in the Gates Planetarium, including Dream To Fly, one of the hit shows of the Summit, and Dinosaurs at Dusk (which we also distribute). We heard talks and panel discussions about best practices and pipelines for production from the producers of To Space and Back, Flight of the Butterflies, Supervolcanoes and Life of Trees. Also presented on the dome were clips and shorts from Sky-Skan’s Ancient Skies (for which I was a script editor and consultant), Towers of Change and others presented on one of the inflatable domes at the meeting.
Keynote speaker Donna Cox, Director of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and she wowed us with visualizations that can and will populate our domes. We also had a chance to see some new and upcoming technologies from Dome3D (who were there touting their GoPro camera solutions and letting us play with the Oculus Rift) that could help fulldome producers in the future.
One of the highlights of the meeting for me was when Jeri Panek of Evans & Sutherland was given a Lifetime Achievement Award for her long-time service to the planetarium and fulldome community. Jeri has been one of my mentors and a long-time friend, and I can’t think of a better person to have been so awarded.
Another highlight was “Fiske Night”, a visit to Fiske Planetarium (on the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado) to sample programs on their new 8K system. Mark and I both trained as planetarians in that dome, and were married in it as well. The new system performed fantastically and gave attendees a peek into the future of fulldome presentation technology.
Each year, I come home tired, but absolutely energized by what I’ve learned at IMERSA from my colleagues and peers. For me, the IMERSA Summit is one of the best get-togethers I attend each year. It lets us all be filmmakers and talk about our craft, our markets, our audiences, and our practices. This year, we met some wonderful filmmakers and are already in discussions with several of them about distribution.
IMERSA rocks!
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