 | | Dynamic Earth Trailer |
Contact: Mike Bruno, Spitz Creative Media
Images: Dynamic Earth image library
Premiering Feb 4 at IMERSA conference in Denver
"Dynamic Earth melds together the educational, scientific, and entertainment values that are the hallmarks of the planetarium community," said the show's co-producer, Mike Bruno of Spitz, Inc. "It's especially great when an effort like this produces a program that is as beautiful as it is educational. This show is action-packed as well as visually stunning. You'll never look at Earth the same way again."
Dynamic Earth is a new immersive digital dome ("fulldome") show that explores the inner workings of Earth's climate engine. Its Feb 4, 2012 world premiere to the industry and the public at the Gates Planetarium in the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS) ties into the annual conference of IMERSA, a professional trade group dedicated to promoting the creative applications of the digital dome for education, entertainment, research and art. Fulldome theaters employ high-resolution digital cinema projection. Systems range from a single fisheye unit to six or more edge-blended projectors.
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Microscopic RADIOLARIANS are rendered in exquisite detail for the giant screen
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Sophisticated digital cinema and digital imaging
in the service of science and art
Fulldome projection systems are being widely adopted throughout the planetarium and science center community to replace older, optomechanical "starball" projectors and film-based systems. "It's an underreported but very real cinema revolution," commented Gates Planetarium director and Dynamic Earth executive producer Dan Neafus. "Some of the most sophisticated and stunning digital cinema experiences today can be found in your neighborhood planetarium."
"The production community is still discovering the creative potential and versatility of fulldome," added Dynamic Earth director Thomas Lucas. "In Dynamic Earth, thanks to intensive supercomputer-based modeling, the digital dome becomes a place to tell a story with intricate visuals and thrilling rides into real places that audiences have never visited."
Dynamic Earth follows a trail of energy that flows from the Sun into the interlocking systems that shape Earth's climate: the atmosphere, oceans, and the biosphere. Highlights include ultra-high-resolution visualizations of giant swirling eddies of the Gulf Stream, a re-creation of the anatomy of Hurricane Katrina, microscopic ocean creatures blown up to giant size, and the most detailed recreation of the surface and atmosphere of Venus ever produced.
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Volcanoes belch CO2 on Earth's sister planet, Venus
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Collaboration between museums, producers
and scientific image researchers
Dynamic Earth is the result of a two-year collaboration between Spitz Creative Media, the Advanced Visualization Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (University of Illinois), NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, and Thomas Lucas Productions, Inc., in association with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
Dynamic Earth explores concepts and terms essential to understanding the climate and fills in major gaps in the public's understanding of climate change. In doing so, it enables audiences to gain perspective on one of the most important issues of our time: the question of how to balance the energy and resource needs of our populations with the need to safeguard Earth's great life support system, the global climate.
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Ocean currents visualization by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
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Dynamic Earth follows on another successful fulldome program by the collaborating teams. Their previous production, Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity, also narrated by Liam Neeson, is recognized as a block-buster in the fulldome community, with distribution to nearly 200 theaters around the world. Dynamic Earth will be distributed worldwide by Spitz, Inc. and Evans & Sutherland.
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