Connect with Habitat Earth on Earth Day…and Beyond

Posted on 21 April 2015 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Celebrate Our Planet With a New Fulldome Show!

Every year, people around the world celebrate Earth Day as a way to honor the connection between our planet and the life that calls it home. We are all interconnected, from the smallest microbes to the most complex animals, a lesson we continue to learn. The first Earth day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, and went international in 1990. It means many things to different populations, but the main message is we must honor our planet and the life it supports. As so many of us often point out in our planetarium shows, only Earth is capable of harboring life as we know it, so it’s important we take care of our home planet.

The chain of life celebrated on Earth Day is the central focus of Habitat Earth: Living in a Connected World, a 2015 show from the California Academy of Sciences’ Morrison Planetarium. Loch Ness Productions is pleased and proud to add it to our distribution catalog for fulldome theaters. It seems appropriate to write about this wonderful show on Earth Day 2015, a time when the show’s message of learning about our planet resonates so strongly with the simple Earth Day message of protecting our planet.

Habitat Earth offers stunning visualizations to focus our attention on the natural world and the dynamic relationships between all flora and fauna. It shows us the biological and human-built networks (and how they intersect), taking show-goers on an incredible, immersive journey through the interconnectedness of life on Earth.

Loch Ness Productions traveled to San Francisco to see the show in February, shortly after its public opening, and I was blown away by the attention to detail the producers put into everything from the script to visualizations and soundtrack. Since then, it has gone on to show at IMERSA 2015, and has just won the Best Brno Observatory and Planetarium Director’s Award at the Central European Fulldome Festival. In my opinion it’s an award well-deserved. This is a show that should be on every theater’s play list.

Habitat Earth is narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Frances McDormand, and certainly advances the boundaries of traditional planetarium content, bringing a uniquely Earth-focused viewpoint to the dome. The 25-minute-long show details the ways humans fit into this ever-evolving story of connection, and along the way, audiences will learn more about what we can do to ensure our cohabitation with the natural world leaves a healthy, sustainable planet for generations to come.

Make Habitat Earth your “go to” show for Earth Day (and every other day too)!

Check out the show’s Web page, where you’ll find more information, previews, and prices.

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Fulldome Specials and Shorts

Posted on 23 March 2015 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Looking for some Dome-worthy Short Subjects?

We’ve got an ambitious schedule of fulldome show releases planned for the coming weeks and months, with at least a half-dozen new full-length shows to add to our distribution catalog. We’ll be announcing them very soon, so get your purchase orders ready!

Before we get to those, though… we’ve unveiled a new section on our Web site.

It’s called BONUS! Specials and Shorts and is accessible in the dropdown menu from the Products->Fulldome Shows menus and pages. The page includes titles that are not necessarily full feature-length shows, but may still be of interest to those looking for supplementary, alternative, or low-cost content to add to their library.

This is where you’ll now find our free-to-download mini-shows, such as Losing the Dark (created for the International Dark-Sky Association) and Light Echoes, from Geodesium “Stella Novus”.

You’ll also discover other titles that may have no license fee; we charge only for encoding them into ready-to-play movies.

If you liked Light Echoes, from Geodesium “Stella Novus”, you may enjoy Geodesium “Nuages Gris”. It takes the next step beyond, turning Hubble Space Telescope imagery into surreal shapes with symbolic implications, set to a haunting space-music treatment of a Franz Liszt solo piano work. Great for those special occasions when you want to treat your audiences with something other-worldly and extraordinary.

Also in the extraordinary category is a fantasy work of CGI from Wade Sylvester and Jason Fletcher, two animators from Boston’s Museum of Science. Titled Waiting Far Away, it’s a story of a space-time traveler who has ventured too far in the cosmos and cannot find his way home. But with the wonderful visions he’s encountering, audiences may want to drift with him forever, surrounded by fantastic visual worlds.

As new short subjects and featurettes appear, remember — this is the place to find them!

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Mobilizing the LNP Site

Posted on 26 January 2015 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Web Site Redesign

With the advent of smartphones, phablets, and the other mobile accoutrements of modern life online, Loch Ness Productions has redesigned our Web site to be more responsive. It seems that many folks like to look at our Web site on our phones and iPads (and like to show it to others during meetings). While the site looked good, it needed to be maximized for devices beyond the desktop computer. If you look at the rest of our site on your desktop monitor (this blog hasn’t been converted yet), it may not be apparent our design has changed much from before.

The difference is more apparent on your portable device (tablet or smartphone) and we hope we’ve made your browsing experience a lot easier! You shouldn’t have to constantly do the pinch/zoom routine like you used to; our pages now optimize themselves for the size of your device’s screen. Of course, some pages work better in either portrait or landscape mode, but mobile users are used to flipping their devices around.

Moreover, depending on your browser’s viewport size, the navigation menus convert to tap-friendly, single-level dropdowns, from the multi-level “dropdown-on-hover” menus we use for the wide desktop-optimized size. It may take an extra tap or two, but those new responsive menus under the and icons will still get you where you want to go. (You’ll see them on your monitor too, if you resize your browser window really narrow — try it!)

All this might not seem like a big deal, and some may think we’re latecomers to the party. But it took us several months of (un)doing things in our site’s HTML code. Our previous design used a tables-based layout, not the flowing CSS model of blocks, divs and floats. There were literally tens of thousands of table cells in our 700+ pages sitewide that needed reworking, and tons of explicit font size calls (measured in points, not scalable ems). Oh, there are still plenty of tables today, but far fewer of them are used just for layout. Some actually contain tabular data, like they’re supposed to!

The last major redesign was more than a decade ago, and people have told us how easily they’ve been able to find things on our site. So we kept most things the same, especially for the desktop; the changes are primarily “under the hood”, to accommodate mobile screens. In making the conversion, though, we decided to forego support for legacy browsers (such as Internet Explorer 7 and below) that don’t fully support CSS3, which wasn’t even around when we last tackled site design.

We still have some work remaining, like finding a good responsive WordPress theme for this blog section. Overall, though, the pages come out the way we want on our own hardware. If you’re encountering weirdness when you look at the pages, please let us know!

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