The Show Distribution Assistant is a part-time position designed to assist Clark Planetarium Productions with the distribution of our digital shows and content. Responsibilities include working with our Show Distribution Specialist regarding show information, technical specifications, exhibition agreements and promotional materials. The chosen applicant will process and ship fulldome video content requests, help maintain and organize existing customer sales information through detailed record keeping.

Required knowledge, skills and abilities:

- Skills in audio and video editing and transcoding, graphics and graphic manipulationStrong organizational skills
- Desktop computer skills with ability to learn new software packages in a timely fashion
- Data management skills
- Ability to communicate effectively both verbally and in writing. This includes the ability to convey technical information in layman terms
- Outstanding interpersonal and professional relations skills
- Ability to work effectively in a creative team environment and under strict deadline requirements.
- Ability to think objectively and logically
- Ability to work independently

Minimum Qualifications:

Minimum of one (1) year experience in computer arts, media, database management or other related field.

Sound like you? Send a letter and resume to:

Mike Murray, Programs Manager
Clark Planetarium
110 South 400 West
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
801-456-4949
Email (preferred)

Position Title: Show Distribution Assistant 19 – 21
Salary: $9.70 hourly (starting)
Job Type: Part-Time, average 20 hours/week
Location: Clark Planetarium
Department: Salt Lake County Community Services

Few mysteries in the universe have the power and awe of the black hole. Only now are we on the verge of understanding their true nature. What are they? How do they form? Are we in danger of being pulled into one?

Uncover the answers to these questions and more in Black Holes.  This immersive digital theater program created by our Clark Planetarium Productions team incorporates some of the most intense three-dimensional visual effects ever created.  Narrated by Star Trek’s John De Lancie, Black Holes lets viewers get up close to one of the most mystifying and astonishing phenomena in the universe.  Journey to the center of a super massive black hole and experience this extreme adventure which takes you to the limits of space and time.

Black Holes is currently playing at 3:30 pm daily in our Hansen Dome Theatre.  Visit our website to purchase tickets or view the trailer.

A detailed look at the evil pirate ship in Attack of the Space Pirates

Attack of the Space Pirates is that show.  It’s a 35-minute feature designed to keep children and adults engaged and entertained as they experience a wild ride through the galaxy on a journey with all of the great sci-fi story elements: mystery, conflict, intrigue, fun, ingenuity, battle, hope and discovery.  It’s our most ambitious digital dome cinema project to date, including amazing sound effects by George Lucas’ Skywalker Sound.

Join the crew of the Starship Intrepid and travel through hyperspace to visit real destinations. You’ll encounter supergiant stars, rogue planets, a black hole and more in your quest to find and assemble a wormhole generator. On your journey, you’ll use real science to help solve the numerous challenges thrown your way. If you survive the dangers of space, a band of pirates will be waiting to take what is yours.  You’ve never experienced an immersive adventure like this!

Bring your family with showings daily.  Visit our website for  more details, the show trailer and show times!

Flight to the Moon is Clark Planetarium’s first joint project with the Space Administration. Our production department was chosen for this project largely for our ability to create and distribute scientifically accurate visualizations with strong public appeal. In addition to featuring the 10-minute newsreel in the Hansen Dome Theatre, our production staff will be working to distribute the newsreel to space and educational institutions all across the world.

Flight to the Moon is part of the Night Vision show

You can see Flight to the Moon in conjunction with the Night Vision show which plays at 6:45 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday evenings. Night Vision is a live narrated astronomy show that showcases current events night sky. In addition to learning about the constellations above, the show will provide updates on the LRO/LCROSS mission as it progresses.

LRO/LCROSS is currently set to launch at 1:51 MST on Wednesday, June 17. If you would like to see the launch live (pending there are no delays), the Clark Planetarium will have the NASA TV channel on display in our concessions area – it would be great to have you join us.

One thing I’ve found surprises a lot of people is that the planetarium produces the majority of the shows shown in the Hansen Digital Dome Theater. Mike mentioned earlier how producing our own shows has led to Clark Planetarium programs being featured in planetariums across the U.S. and around the world.

The process for making a show starts with the brainstorming of ideas for what would be a good topic to explore. Sometimes this can be hard because what we consider exciting and strange, the public doesn’t have an interest in. For example, I find Heliophysics to be fascinating. But when you try and pitch to a crowd the physics of the Sun and Earth interacting, that’s a hard sell. So we spend a lot of time surveying the public as well as other planetariums to see what topics they’re interested in. Based off the news headlines, I think good future topics might be dark matter, the greatest explosions throughout the universe, and of course the retirement of the shuttle.

After the topic is chosen, it’s written into a show script. The script will also include visual guidelines to make sure there’s a sense of continuity to the program. Each animator on staff helps contribute to the visual guidance to really give the show a lot of depth.

Now that we have a visual feel to the show, we start making the “assets”. Assets can be surface textures, models, special plug-ins and video. We also spend a lot of time pestering our education department for information. It may be cool to make a long and vibrant comet tail out by Jupiter, but it just wouldn’t be realistic. We try our best to correct for what Hollywood has been teaching for decades.

About the time we’ve gone as far as we can with assets, we’ll get the soundtrack from our sound engineer. He takes a lot of care selecting musical pieces that will fit the mood of the show and give it an over-all theme. The narration is also carefully weaved into the music to give tempo and clarity to the voice acting.

Here’s where the creative side of our minds get to kick in. Sometimes it may be that a 3D scene needs more detail because of the way the narration plays out. It could be that the fitting all the 3D objects into a scene means breaking them up into separate files because of a quirk in the rendering program. It’s like a puzzle. Every problem has a solution, it just might be a bit harder to find.

The process of making these images, which are 42 time the size of an average tv show, can eat up a lot of computer time. Luckily we just upgraded to a new render farm. This render farm was funded through the largess of the Larry Miller Family and made by the great team at Universal Systems. Each machine can process 8 instructions at the same moment, but this has practical limits. So if one part of the render doesn’t use all 8 instruction paths, the render may take much longer. If you added the total of the potential processing speed inside these machines, you get 1.08 trillion.

Once the parts of the image are computed, they write out into individual images. Storing all the component and final images can expand beyond several terabytes. Needless to say, losing any images hinder the production. We compensate by keeping all data in a RAID [redundant array of independent devices].

We are almost there. All the clips get edited together into a master image set. This final master image set goes through a “slicing” process to pull out the parts that will match to each projector in the theater. These slices are then made into 6 master video files.

Through the few years that full-dome video has been around, the process has been through some growing pains because of the rapid nature of technological development. We decided a long time ago not to ride the bleeding edge of technological developments but wait for the “pro-sumer” level for stability and cost savings.

Wow… so that’s a lot to read. I’d be glad to do a Q&A for my next post if anyone has questions, post them to the comments and I’ll clarify the overly lengthy post.

From the basement…

David M

The idea of what a planetarium even is has gone through a renaissance in just the last 5 years.  We were among the first dome theaters to “go digital” in 2003 – now there are over 500 in the world.  In this medium, “digital” is more than a great marketing buzz word.  Digital show production has literally exploded the boundaries of what planetariums can do.  Instead of capturing a “snapshot” of the sky or a 360-degree scene on another planet, everything is now full-color, high resolution animation.  Now we can show the universe the way it was really meant to be seen!

A great example of this is our newest production, Saturn: Jewel of the Heavens. Even though the ’still photos’ from the Cassini spacecraft are spectacular in their own right, our producers took the photomaps, wrapped them onto 3-dimensional spheres, and sculpted height map information to make them show true surface relief!  In other words, when you fly through the ice canyons of Enceladus, it’s like hitching a roller coaster ride on the spacecraft itself.

It’s also why our “Cosmic Light Shows” are like no other domed entertainment show.  3D-based art and scenery can go way beyond the “laser shows” of the old Hansen Planetarium…but that’s another subject for a future post.