"Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end..." -- Mary Hopkin

A Paradigm Shift To Digital Show Packages

In the olden days, there were "show kits". They consisted mostly of 35mm slides. The price of a show kit tended to be based on the running time, or the number of slides it contained, or sometimes even the age level of the show's intended audience.

There are drawbacks to all those methods: the quantity of slides has nothing to do with the skull sweat that went into the creation of the script, the musician's work in the soundtrack, the laboring of the artists to generate the visuals, and the producer's efforts to put it all together. Running time is an editing decision, with little bearing on a show's development costs, the creative fees paid to voice talent, photo and copyright permissions, royalties paid, and all the non-slide materials that make up the show. And just because a show might be intended for, say, pre-schoolers, doesn't mean production values should be sacrificed; the resources expended to put words on the page, the audio on the soundtrack, and film in the slide mounts all remain the same.

"The times, they are a-changin'..." -- Bob Dylan

Nowadays, we have planetarium systems that use no slide projectors at all. It logically follows that we can have planetarium show packages with no slides at all. Yet all the creative work still goes into the making of the show, and one has to pay for it somehow.

The advent of the digital age and the incorporation of computers into every aspect of Loch Ness Productions' operations has homogenized the ways we produce shows. Everything is digital. The scriptwriter's words are entered into the computer; the script pages themselves are computer documents. All our visual material -- still and video -- is digitized and manipulated in the computer. The audio is recorded, edited, and mixed in the computer. We're still creatively combining our thoughts, our visions, and our aural interpretations into an artful entity as always; we're just using the same basic tool, the computer, to work those ideas.

The chances are, digital production methods have found their way into your everyday planetarium operations too. After all, you're reading this on your computer. Our customers have been asking for soundtracks as .WAV files to work in their audio programs. Many have DigiDome to make seamless panoramas and all-sky imagery for their theaters (and if you don't, you should; that's why we carry it in our catalog!) For years now, we've offered some show packages with multi-panel panoramas and all-skies in digital form; it's hardly a stretch for us to offer the single-panel images that way too.

"Evolution is not a theory, it's a fact." -- Carl Sagan

But now we're shipping ones and zeroes, burned on a recordable CD or DVD -- distribution media that cost the equivalent of a decent pepperoni pizza. Clearly in this digital era, we have to devise a more appropriate model for pricing.

So, we've done just that. The concept is pretty simple: We provide you with:

  1) the "gestalt" of the show -- the assemblage of ideas, emotions, and artistry -- in the digital form we use to create it, along with
  2) permission to show it to your planetarium audiences -- the performance license.

Then we set a price point that reflects what we feel is a fair value and recompense for our efforts.

Forget about the quantities of slides and panoramas, the length of the show, the age group. You get a planetarium show, for one set price, distributed in digital form. Need more? No problem, read on...

"Forward...into the past!" -- Dan Catherwood

Yes, we know that even today, many planetarians still think in terms of "how many slides in the panoramas?" and "how many slide projectors and special effects does a show need?" And for the past 10 years, we've heard over and over how wonderful it is that our show slides were already masked and mounted in glass Wess mounts. Why would we seemingly regress to a form of show distribution that requires the customer to make, mask, and mount their own slides?

As we noted above, slide projector based systems are no longer the only form of image projection. Today's digital-based planetaria don't use slide projectors at all, but they can use our show materials in their native digital distribution form. If you have one of those, you're all set. But it's true, those with more traditional analog slide projectors will need to convert our digital images into slide film. This isn't unfamiliar territory; some planetarium facilities have film recorders for the purpose; others make use of photo labs or service bureaus -- read more here. We'll even tell you about the methods we once used in our studios -- read more here.

"Standing in a slide zone, you could be stepping through a time zone." -- Moody Blues

We know probably better than anyone that it takes a lot of effort to make good planetarium-style slides. Since 1989, we've shipped hundreds of thousands of hand-mounted 35mm glass slides to our Classic Planetarium Shows and Image Library customers around the world.

But after 18 years, we had to shut down the Loch Ness Productions slide manufacturing facility. The reason was simple — reliable sources for the mounts and film we used for making slides disappeared.

If you continue to work with slide projectors, and still have the resources to make and mount your own slides, good for you! Loch Ness Productions will continue to provide you with digital source material — images and masks — from which you can do your thing. We've been doing that for years.

For upcoming planetarium shows, we encourage you to acquire fulldome video technology. That's where we're focusing our production efforts these days.

"The only constant is change itself." -- Wise Old Saying

As new production methods enabled by digital technology increasingly wend their way throughout our creative process, it's only natural that the products we provide change with the times too. But while the delivery medium for our shows may evolve, what will remain constant is the consistent quality and value we are able to provide to you, our customers.