When in Dome…

When our current team solidified at the very beginning of Morehead Production, we came from very different backgrounds. Jay, a designer and journalist; Pete, a motion graphics and compositor; and myself an animator. The one thing we did all had in common however was we had never done dome work. We have since learned from [more …]

In the first four fulldome shows that Morehead produced, we didn’t have to do much collaboration with outside groups. We’d sometimes contract out a writer or the composer, but for the most part, our productions were created almost completely in-house. That all changed when we met with Donovan Zimmerman from Paperhand Puppet Intervention and decided [more …]

Early on in the planning stages of “The Longest Night,” we realized there were going to be some big changes to how we approached production. Typically we work with animated CG characters and environments. We can dictate actions and are in charge of a camera that is essentially unlimited in its range of motion. With this production we [more …]

We’re right in the middle of production on our newest show, tentatively called The Longest Night: A Winter’s Tale.  The show is being created in collaboration with Paperhand Puppet Intervention, a talented crew of people who normally produce live theater with giant puppets, masks, stilt dancing, rod puppets, shadows or silhouettes, and anything else they think will [more …]

              Next week we are heading out to Denver for the Feb 3-5 2012 IMERSA Summit. This year’s theme is “Lessons from our past, Visualizing our future: Winning solutions for the digital dome.” We’re screening our new show, Solar System Odyssey, at 5:30PM on Friday and then I’ll be giving a [more …]

I was recently at a non-planetarium, non-fulldome conference for science communicators called ScienceOnline. The attendees that I met, who happened to be mostly scientists, science journalists or pr people, generally didn’t know what I meant when I said I “produced fulldome video.” As many of us have experienced, saying that you make “planetarium shows” doesn’t [more …]

When we started producing dome content 4 years ago, we were working on two different 3d platforms, 3ds max and Maya, and still doing a 5 camera stitch with a hemi-cube. We used the 5 camera stich to create our first two productions, “Earth Moon and Sun” and “Magic Tree House.” On our most recent [more …]

In a previous post Jim talked about doing a believable shake on the 3D camera itself. With motion blur turned on this can get a bit expensive as far as render times. Sometimes we lean on After Effects to push a shake to even greater extremes. In this example you’ll see a 2D shake added [more …]

We just rendered a flat screen version of the trailer for our newest show – Solar System Odyssey. Looks pretty good in a rectangular format, if I do say so myself.  Check it out below. But you’ll have to check it out on a dome to get the full effect, obviously.

  Have a warm and wonderful holiday season and a happy new year. -Your friends at Morehead