If you wish to learn a bit or two about how the fulldome show was made, to peak behind the curtain and read about our adventurous production, this page is the right place for you.
At the beginning, there was but a topic… Preservation of the environment. Okay, there was a bit more than just that. We had a plan to create a fulldome movie, had a team of friends and colleagues willing to exchange hundreds of emails over the next two years and the opportunity for the project to be funded from the Erasmus+ programme. And so we submitted a project proposal and as soon as it got accepted, we sat down together in the Brno Observatory and Planetarium, for an intensive brainstorming session.
The main outcome from our first international meeting was the storyline of the show, first list of the topics we wanted to focus on and the idea to begin the show with something strong…
Something that people usually do not connect with the modern satellite technology…
We decided to begin the show with the first ever picture of the Earth from space, taken by a camera onboard a WW2 V2 rocket.
The main outline of the story was settled, we started writting the script and first animation tasks were given to the team. Thanks to the versatility of the team, we had many options for visualization. Of course, the main strength of our small production team was the SkyExplorer software in our planetariums, that allows rather fast creation of nicely looking animations.
However, even SkyExplorer has its limits – it was decided that the show will be a combination of all styles we are able to bring to the table. In house blender skills, camera and drone equipment, expertise in data visualization… but we felt like some parts of the show, mainly the first one, deserve a more refined touch.
An external animator, with high end animation team was hired to deliver some of the shots – UMA Vision from Ukraine.
Even in contrast with CGI, the live action footage was nonetheless challenging.
Not only in terms of finding the right locations for our scenes, but mainly in terms of the weather and the seasons!
What difference does it make if you have multiple reminders for August to record a footage of a harvest, if the summer has been so hot and dry that it rescheduled the harvests nearly a month sooner?
Realising that many fields are already empty while looking from a window put us into a full panic mode. We decided to jump into our car and head out to higher altitudes of Czech Republic, hoping we would find crops still waiting to be harvested.
As a precaution, we packed all out equipment. Just in case. To our suprise, it took only a few tens of kilometer to arrive to a field, where the harvest was happening at the very moment.
At what’s more, the owner was supervising the process! After a quick chat he allowed us to record everything and our luck did not end there. The driver of the harvester agreed to have a fisheye camera mounted to the window of his vehicle. Now that is not a shot you get to see every day!
The strange looking drone attachment you see in the picture is actually a simpl Insta360 camera, hanging underneath the drone in a large enough distance in order to have the drone as small as possible for removal from the image. This approach allows us to create drone fisheye footage in a very low cost way, while also allowing us to adjust camera angle in post.
Luckily, not all live action shots are so weather dependent – especially the indoor ones. But they can be challenging nonetheless. A video of a blinking server room of FASTER.CZ company is the easier one. However, recording a room full of space engineers at work can seem like a piece of cake until they realise they are on camera. Suddenly, even everyday routine becomes strangely difficult. Luckily, no satellite part came to any harm.
A very common situation is using footage from one’s archives. It very often happens that you shoot something you do not use immediately and you store it in your “for future use” drawer. Reaching into this drawer and picking up long forgotten materials, that fit your needs perfectly is priceless.
And sometimes it is not even your own drawer. Sometimes you reach out to your friends and colleagues from the fulldome community, who are awesome for willing to share their works to be used in your show.