Festive Fulldome Showings

Posted on 17 August 2013 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Loch Ness Productions Offerings at the Imiloa Fulldome Film Festival

Attendees at the upcoming Imiloa Fulldome Film Festival will see three offerings from the Loch Ness Productions catalog of fulldome shows as part of the event’s extensive lineup of presentations.

Chaos and Order: A Mathematic Symphony was selected by the judges for inclusion in the main festival schedule. Produced by media artists Rocco Helmchen and Johannes Kraas, with distribution by Loch Ness Productions, it’s a multi-disciplinary tour-de-force combining mathematics, art and music.

Also chosen for the festival is Losing the Dark, a short show about light pollution produced by Loch Ness Productions in collaboration with the International Dark-Sky Association. This popular show has been downloaded by fulldome theaters, educators, and outreach professionals around the world, conveying the message about how we can return the dark of night to planet Earth. Both Chaos and Order and Losing the Dark were award winners at the Fulldome Festival 2013 held earlier this year in Jena, Germany.

Imiloa attendees will also have the opportunity to see Into the Deep, produced by Ogrefish FilmProductions of Austria. The festival is featuring the U.S. English version created by Loch Ness Productions for Ogrefish. The show takes viewers to the deep seas, one of the last and largely unexplored frontiers on Earth. This program will run in rotation on Imiloa’s Showdome throughout the festival.

“We are incredibly pleased to have three shows on display at the Imiloa Fulldome Film Festival,” said Carolyn Collins Petersen, CEO of Loch Ness Productions. “They represent a small percentage of the growing number of diverse topics presented in fulldome theaters. In particular, Chaos and Order is a notable departure from the strictly astronomical content that has dominated planetarium theaters in the past.”

Astronomy continues to play an integral role in many theaters, but other topics are making their way into the fulldome repertoire, according to Mark C. Petersen, President of Loch Ness Productions. He maintains the LNP Fulldome Show Compendium, an extensive online listing of fulldome shows he began compiling in early 2009 and updates regularly. “There are nearly 300 shows on the market now,” he said. “The Imiloa Fulldome Festival is a wonderful cross-section of what’s in the repertory.”

The Festival runs from September 5-7, 2013 at the Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo, Hawai’i.

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Astronomy 101

Posted on 13 August 2013 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

 Bite-Size Astronomy for Lay Readers

Astronomy has long been one of the mainstays of the programs we produce and distribute at Loch Ness Productions. That’s because we find astronomy fascinating, and have done so since childhood. I grew up reading about the stars and planets, and I wanted to be an astronaut. Both times I was in college I took astronomy classes and also found my way to the university’s planetarium, which kindled the career I’ve carved out for myself: one of astronomy popularizer.

I began writing about astronomy long before I went to graduate school to study the makings of planets, stars, and galaxies, however. My first show was about the concept of light travel time and light-years, and you all know it as Light Years from Andromeda. Since that time I’ve written dozens of astronomy scripts. But, I’ve also been writing many articles and books as well (you can see my full bibliography here), including the best-selling Hubble Vision and Visions of the Cosmos books through Cambridge University Press.

IMG_0039Well, I’m proud to say that I’ve done it again: published another book. It’s called Astronomy 101: From the Sun and Moon to Wormholes and Warp Drive, Key Theories, Discoveries, and Facts about the Universe (ISBN-13: 978-1440563591) published by Adams Media.

The publishers came to me last year asking if I’d like to write a book of astronomy topics, each about a thousand words long. They wanted me to distill the essence of an astronomy topic for lay readers who are interested in astronomy but hadn’t had a chance to take an astronomy class in high school or college. Astronomy 101 is the result. Want to know more about how the Sun formed? What black holes are? Answer questions from your friends, family, and audience members about warp drive or famous astronomers? The book covers those subjects and much more.

Just as with any Loch Ness Productions show script, I relied on a number of my colleagues in astronomy and the science writing community as background readers and consultants. They were essential for my research as well as the fact-checking process, and the book is much stronger as a result of their help.

If you’re looking for a handy reference book, additional reading for your classes, or something to recommend to a planetarium audience member, I hope you’ll think of Astronomy 101. Like my shows, articles, other publications, and online offerings, it was written for everybody to learn from and enjoy!

Posted in Fulldome, General, Other LNP projects | 3 Comments

Better and Better: the LNP Fulldome Show Compendium!

Posted on 6 August 2013 by Mark C. Petersen

Browsing the World’s Fulldome Shows

Since 2009, we’ve been providing a valuable online resource to the world: our Fulldome Show Compendium. It’s a listing of almost every fulldome show on the market — not just our own shows and the ones we distribute from other producers, but practically everybody’s. And since its introduction, producers and fulldome professionals alike have been using the Fulldome Show Compendium as their “go to” site to find out what’s happening in the fulldome video world.

I’ve been tweaking the appearance of the Compendium and adding some enhancements recently, such as beveling the edges of the sortable column headers to look more click-able, and adding a “quick jump” alphabet-selector line for faster scrolling. So, with those improvements and others now in place, I want to share some of the philosophy behind our apparent benevolence.

One of our primary intents for making the Fulldome Show Compendium is to provide a service for show shoppers. Sure, they’re certainly our prime target demographic, both for our own titles and those we distribute from other producers. But often, browsing shoppers need to know what else is out there too, so they can make informed choices when narrowing down their selections. They may not always be aware of a show’s existence; by simply scrolling through our listings, spotting a show title might just pique their interest.

Before we started the Fulldome Show Compendium, nothing like it existed online. Of course, those of us on the distribution side have always needed to keep track of what titles are in production or have shipped. When we began posting this information, nobody else had made that collected knowledge available on the Internet. We were the first.

Naturally, we hope our Web visitors will find the titles we offer in our catalog to be just what they’re looking for, and they click on the PRICE icon to place their order. However, if we don’t happen to have exactly what they’re looking for, we have no problem sending the shopper to shows produced by someone else, even if that might be to “the competition”.

Our great hope has always been that everyone finds the Fulldome Show Compendium to be quick and convenient to use. We hope you’ll come to it first when shopping for shows, and will tell your friends and colleagues to do so, too.

For Your Browsing Ease

The Fulldome Show Compendium’s convenience comes from its comprehensiveness. We designed it to get out as much useful information as quickly as we can, and to put it all either right up front, or just one easy click away. You just scroll through our sortable listings — then a single click takes you to the Web page for the show, the streaming preview if there’s one online, and the pricing (if it’s a title we distribute). Quick and easy, that’s the mantra.

The default listing order is by producer… but it should be apparent you can click on the header columns to sort the tables.

Let’s say you want to find out what’s new, the most recently released titles. You just click on the YEAR header, and all the world’s fulldome titles come up sorted in chronological order by the year they were produced, with the newest at the top. (The ones still in production show up at the end, because they don’t have a “year produced” yet!)

Maybe you’re looking for short shows — or long ones, for that matter. Simply sort by running time, and just scroll the list.

AUDIENCE: Little onesAUDIENCE: Youth AUDIENCE: General public  Looking for shows targeted for the kiddies? We’ve assigned up to three easy-to-spot AUDIENCE icons per title, and a click on the header sorts them, putting the tykes on top.

GENRE: Earth/SpaceShopping for music shows, or biology, or holiday, or pure entertainment shows? Choose your GENRE, and scroll to browse. One click, instant gratification!

There are other less-obvious benefits to having a comprehensive list of shows in this tabular format. For example, you can judge how popular a genre is by simply counting the number of available titles it contains. Or, how about those kid’s shows? Out of nearly 300 titles available, we list only 15 that are targeted specifically for the littlest children. There simply haven’t been that many made that are commercially available; you can tell at a glance because there are so few to scroll through. What’s the running time for most shows? Just scroll and drink in the data. There’s simply no other way to get an easy handle on this kind of information, other than from the Fulldome Show Compendium.

Preview it! Then there’s the ever-so-fast VIEW icon. For shows we distribute, users jump right to our Previews pages (I tried to make those easy to spot — with bright green boxes, more colorful icons, and movie posters in the listings). For shows we don’t distribute, a new window opens and takes you to the trailer or full-length preview posted on YouTube or Vimeo. Now when you browse our list and any title catches your eye, with just one click you’re watching it! Pretty nifty.

Finally, from the customer-friendly aspect, for the shows that we distribute, one of the advantages to shopping on the Loch Ness Productions site is that we operate differently from other distributors in a very important way: we publish our prices. We see no reason the customer should be kept in the dark about the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. We think a more-enlightened customer is a happier customer; the more informed you are, the more informed will be your choices.

Price it!So, we can offer a unique feature nobody else does — the quick-jump PRICE icon to take shoppers directly to a show’s Prices page. Go ahead and comparison shop!

With the ever-increasing number of fulldome shows available (nearly 300, from more than 80 producers), we hope our Fulldome Show Compendium will continue be a useful aid to users who are shopping for content. If you’re in the market for fulldome shows — not only those produced and distributed by Loch Ness Productions, but others, too — we invite you to bookmark this page for your Favorites list:



http://www.lochnessproductions.com/lfsc/lfsc.html

Even better, we’d be happy if you include a link to the LNP Fulldome Show Compendium on your own Web site. Just right-click on the image above to save it to your computer.

We welcome any comments or suggestions you may have to make the Fulldome Show Compendium even more useful to you for the future, whether you’re a theater looking for shows or a producer looking to get the word out about your work.

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