Fragile Planet Promotion

To celebrate the five year anniversary of the release of the California Academy of Sciences' premiere show Fragile Planet: Earth's Place in the Universe, we're offering a special discount:

For those on fiscal year budgets, this is a good opportunity to make those end-of-the-year dollars stretch a little farther!

New Dinosaurs at Dusk movie poster!

And Mirage3D is continuing to work on create what is sure to be the best show they've ever created! We're excited about its upcoming release.

While we're waiting, check out all the production snapshots they've posted on the Mirage3D Studios Facebook page.

Losing the Dark now available in Polish!

And we're continuing to work on creating even more translations!

Losing the Dark now available in five languages

Those five are: US English, German, Hindi, Korean, and Spanish.

To help pay for all the additional production work to create all the fulldome and flat-screen versions, the IDA has set up a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo, called Taking Losing the Dark Global. If you can contribute to the cause, and help us can get the word out about this serious issue, we will all appreciate it. And you'll see the results right here on the Losing the Dark downloads pages.

Go to the IDA's Indiegogo campaign!

Chaos and Order - A Mathematic Symphony

And now, for a refreshingly different take on entertainment "light shows" — a wonderfully choreographed journey into the world of mathematics visualization.

Chaos and Order - A Mathematic Symphony is a virtuoso performance of animation and music. Media artists Rocco Helmchen and Johannes Kraas take audiences on a majestic trip through the fascinating world of mathematics.

Losing the Dark now available in German

It's been out for only a few weeks, and already our show Losing the Dark has had more than 10,000 views from its various postings on YouTube, and hundreds of downloads. We're very pleased with all the positive comments and reviews we've received.

We produced the show in English first, of course, and it was always planned that we would make several translations available thereafter. Today, the first one out of the studio is German, and more languages will be following soon.

How many more? Well, the International Dark-Sky Association has had more than 18 requests for additional languages so far — a pretty good indicator of the show's popularity. We're all gratified by the response, of course, and we want to meet the demand.

To help pay for all the additional production work to create all the fulldome and flat-screen versions, the IDA has set up a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo, called Taking Losing the Dark Global. If you can contribute to the cause, and help us can get the word out about this serious issue, we will all appreciate it. And you'll see the results right here on the Losing the Dark downloads pages.

Go to the IDA's Indiegogo campaign!

Losing the Dark now available

Loch Ness Productions, in collaboration with the International Dark-Sky Association, is proud to announce the availability of a new free-for-download planetarium show highlighting the issues regarding light pollution. It's called Losing the Dark.

Written and narrated by Carolyn Collins Petersen, produced by Mark C. Petersen, and soundtrack music from Geodesium, Losing the Dark introduces and illustrates some of the issues regarding light pollution, and suggests three simple actions people can take to help mitigate it. The show gives planetarium professionals a tool to help educate the public about the problems of light pollution.

The 6.5-minute public service announcement is being distributed in two forms. Of course, it's a fulldome video, for digital dome theaters. We've also made the show as a high-definition flat screen video; classic planetarium theaters without fulldome capability can show this version using their traditional video projectors.

The show is currently available in English, but translations are underway that will allow the program to reach a worldwide audience — and if you can help in the process, the IDA would love to hear from you!

Major donations from Starmap and the Fred Maytag Family Foundation funded Losing the Dark. The project was launched with seed money from the International Planetarium Society and donations from IDA members.

Go here to help bring back the dark of night to planet Earth!

2012 State of the Dome address now online

At the IMERSA summit last weekend, Mark gave what's become a quasi-annual presentation: his State of the Dome address.

It's an overview of what's been happening in the fulldome world over the last year, what projector systems are out there, and how fulldome shows are being presented. It can provide some answers to the quintessential questions: "Who are we, where are we, and what are we doing?"

Along with the "State of the Dome" presentations from previous years, the latest edition is now posted as an article in the Reference section. We hope you find it useful and enlightening!

Immensely immersive new show: Into The Deep

There are two environments particularly suited to the immersive expanse of the dome: outer space and underwater scenes. We've got them both — as we dive Into The Deep.

From Austria's Ogrefish Filmproductions comes this exemplary documentary, combining marine biology and underwater geology with the fascinating history of deep-sea exploration. Audiences will experience dives to the "Lost City" and the RMS Titanic in the Atlantic, the famed Galapagos "black smokers", and the Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific. In the deepest parts of our oceans, we glimpse bioluminescent life forms so strange-looking they could be from the realm of science fiction.

As we've done with other shows (such as last year's Lars the Little Polar Bear), we have adapted Into The Deep's original script, and recorded a new narration — this time with California-based voiceover actor Jon Mohr making his first appearance on the Loch Ness Productions talent roster.

Into the Deep is a exciting, engaging and engrossing exploration of Earth's oceans, using the immersive power of the dome theater to transport audiences to the spectacular hidden depths of our home planet.

Descend here... Into The Deep!

Dazzling new entertainment show: Chaos and Order - A Mathematic Symphony

And now, for a refreshingly different take on entertainment "light shows" — a wonderfully choreographed journey into the world of mathematics visualization.

Chaos and Order - A Mathematic Symphony is a virtuoso performance of animation and music. Media artists Rocco Helmchen and Johannes Kraas take audiences on a majestic trip through the fascinating world of mathematics.

This 40-minute tour de force goes beyond the functions and equations to show us how math is the underpinning of every structure and event in the cosmos. Learn the language of the cosmos in a whole new way, through this beautiful and breathtaking immersive program.

Loch Ness Productions is proud make this show available to you and your audiences. Your students will never look at math the same way again!

Refreshingly new cosmology show: Cosmic Dance

And now, for a novel approach to quantum physics...

How do other cultures see the universe? What stories do they tell about the cosmos?

Cosmic Dance, from filmmaker Harald Singer at LivinGlobe, is an intriguing and thought-provoking show that explores the universe through the eyes of Leela, a beautiful young Canadian physics student and dancer, as she gets in touch with the cosmos through her cultural upbringing. It's a fascinating tour of an exotic culture, and gives your audiences the chance to see the cosmos through Hindu eyes.

Cosmic Dance is a beautiful fulldome show filmed in Canada and India, featuring alternative views of the nature of the cosmos, while at the same time offering a perspective of modern science not often illustrated in textbooks. Leela's interpretive dance movements provide evocative entertainment, while the Bollywood-style dancing and choreography, digitally juxtaposed on the most colorful space imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope, will take inquiring minds on an unforgettable trip!

This is definitely one of the most fascinating cultural fulldome shows you're likely to experience, combining state-of-the-art science and cosmology with the viewpoint of one of the world's oldest religious and cultural populations.

Step this way... to Cosmic Dance!

Dynamic new show:
Earthquake: Evidence of a Restless Planet

We're pleased and proud to add to our catalog of educationally diverse fulldome offerings the latest from the California Academy of Sciences' Morrison Planetarium: Earthquake: Evidence of a Restless Planet.

This sweeping geological journey surveys the many forces that lead to changes on the surface of our planet, using data-driven visualizations and location photography to bring audiences a real feel for the tectonic forces that affect our planet and our lives.

This is a great show for planetary science and geology classes, as well as members of the public curious about just what causes earthquakes, and what we're learning about how best to prepare for them.

Prepare to be moved...

Enhancements to the LNP Fulldome Show Compendium

We made the LNP Fulldome Show Compendium, our listing of practically every fulldome show on the market, even more useful.

First, we've come up with new criteria for sorting the entries. We now classify shows by two additional categories: GENRE and target AUDIENCES. Assuredly, some programs have content that transcends a solitary descriptor, or appeals to more than one specific age group. Still, we hope you'll find our general categorizations helpful when scanning what titles are out there.

A column previously called "Subject" is now called "Topics". It's not sortable, but it is keyword-searchable, using your browser's Find function.

Then, we've added a new column with fast links to online previews. For shows that we distribute, you jump right to our Previews pages; otherwise, a new window opens and takes you to trailers posted on YouTube or Vimeo. Now if you're browsing the listings and a title catches your eye, just one click and you're watching it! Pretty nifty.

We've made easier to spot the shows that Loch Ness Productions distributes — by including their movie posters in the listings, as well as a quick-jump button to the all-important Price pages!

And we've provided a Listings Key to explain all this additional functionality!

Finally, we describe in a little more detail what shows we list (and what we don't), as an FAQ spindown at the bottom of each Fulldome Show Compendium page.

Unlike some other fulldome show database sites so heavily laden with flash animations that the pages take forever to load and bog down your browser, our intent is to get you as much useful information as quickly as we can. You just scroll through our sortable listings — then a single click of the mouse takes you to the Web page for the show, the preview if it's online, and the pricing (if it's a title we distribute). What could be simpler?

With the ever-increasing number of fulldome shows available (more than 250, from more than 75 producers — totals that are another enhancement you can now see on the pages), we hope the LNP Fulldome Show Compendium will aid you in compiling your shopping lists! (Hint: go for the ones in green boxes!)

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

Mark C. Petersen, webmaster