4-H EVOLVING

IN 2009

I started working on a video to promote the 4-H Denver area program expansion. The challenge was that it was my first fulldome production, and I needed to render it at 3k. I built a small computing farm with 27 cores across 9 different machines to help crunch the 21K+ frames needed for the 12 minute show. To make the task harder, I had only two months to complete the production.

Work started in August and I had these machines running around the clock, 24/7, for the entire two month production period. Two nights before the GALA at which this production would be shown, I took my frames down to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science so the production director could add them to their computer. At a truly great planetarium, phenomenal resolutions are achieved by using upwards of 5 or even 8 projectors all covering different patches of the dome. They seamlessly meld into an immersive fulldome theater system, but to add frames to the system takes a day or more as it has to split them into these pie shaped pieces.

The night before the show, someone from the 4-H organization asked about making an edit and the director and I just looked at each other because, edits, the night before the show, just really don't happen. Edits take days. But it was a good laugh.

This is the final render of this production, '4-H Evolving,' formatted for projection with a mirrodome in a fulldome theater.