An experienced team of planetarium show producers, script writers, didactic professionals, designers, 3D artists and astronomers have joined forces to produce Journey to a Billion Suns in the highest quality on the market. Some of the key team members:
Michel Magens is our art director. He has studied communications design and been working since as a freelance designer for agencies, museums, science centres and industry clients. He’s experienced in interactive game design, data simulation and multimedia visualization. One of his recent work was the game design of a digital table for the German pavilion at the Yesou Ocean Expo in Korea 2012. Michel has been involved in the multi-award winning planetarium show ‘Darwin and his Orchids’ – while now he will be responsible for the overall design, look, moods, style and visual atmosphere of our new and ambitious show #billionsuns.
Bob Weber is our lead 3D artist. He has been a key figure in my previous Fulldome show “Edge of the Universe” produced 2007-2009 – in fact he was turning everything tricky and difficult into stunning 3D sequences. Bob is a freelance based in Kiel, and produces from education software through technical visualisation and TV to planetarium show episodes of highest grade. In addition, he’s teaching 3D animation and compositing at the Kiel University of Applied Sciences. Bob will be responsible for the quality and the visual impact of all animated graphics in our new show #billionsuns.
Dr. Olaf Fischer is our lead didactic advisor. He studied physics and astronomy in Jena and worked as a specialist teacher in Leipzig, before he switched to the Friedrich-Schiller University and made his PhD. Later he became a researcher at MPI in Heidelberg and MPI in Bonn, and again in Jena, where he habilitated in “bridging astronomical findings by modelling and experiments”. For several years, he was a member of the working group ‘teaching methodology in physics’ and later research fellow at the Baden-Württemberg state academy of professional training. Since 2005, Olaf is the driving force of the project “science into schools”. He teaches teachers, hosts students and triggers scientific education. Lately he was appointed as an adjoint professor at the Heidelberg University.Olaf is consulting our project with his vast didactic background and suggests entries and links to curriculums and teaching. He will help us develop an educators’ guide that will build on our new show #billionsuns and support teachers in making scientific education more vivid and powerful.
Martin Kossmann is our lead FX artist. Started as a 3D autodidact 15 years ago, he has been working in almost every field of animated graphics’ production, and finally concentrated on particle animation and dynamic simulation. Martin has been working for renewed companies like Pixomondo and Animationsfabrik and as a freelance. He was producing for TV ad campaigns (Nivea, Sion, Audi, Porsche, Müller Milch, Champions League Final), computer games (Battlefield), as well as for key sequences in TV features (Vulkan, Terra-X) and in blockbuster cinema movies such as Fast Five, Super-8, The Losers, The Great Gatsby and iFrankenstein. Our new show #billionsuns is an amazing playground for an FX professional like Martin. Stellar coronae, nebular clusters, interstellar dust, clouds and any type of haze, fog and mist in the Universe is inconceivable without thorough understanding of particle animations. The smoke of a launching rocket piercing through the cloud layers – it’s all about special software and expertise in dynamic simulation.
Joachim Perschbacher is our executive producer. He’s been creating content for fulldome shows since 2005 and co-founded NorthDocks in 2009 – the company making our new show #billionsuns. He was a team member of the previous ESA planetarium show „Edge of the Universe“ and co-produced shows as „The Rainbow Fish and his Friends“ and the „Magic of the Otherworld“, shown in planetariums world-wide. Further to his dome projects, Joachim is providing renowned companies like Asus, Zeiss and Intel with high quality computer generated graphics. Joachim will supervise the production, schedule the render farm, produce 3D sequences and sprinkle magic dust over the scenes of our new show #billionsuns.
Gabriel Stöckle is giving professional advice in astronomy to the team. He has studied astronomy in Vienna, and his thesis was about a “Feasibility Study of Parallaxes” with the European CoRoT mission. Later he moved to Stuttgart in Germany and started working with the data processing team of the Gaia mission at the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut in Heidelberg. As an IT expert, he was working on the theory of data reduction and data processing, which is one of the major challenges of the Gaia mission on the ground. He is an active member of the Stuttgart observatory and has helped developing our journey through the Milky Way, a key element of our new show #billionsuns.
Karl Alexander Weck is our dramaturgic adviser. Starting as a journalist three decades ago, he has been a film maker and script writer since 20 years. Karl Alexander studied media & communications at the University of London’s Goldsmiths College, and later drama and script writing at the Master School in Berlin. He’s been working as a script writer and producer for documentaries, theme nights, history episodes and features on television, and consulted major companies on their visual public presence. Karl Alexander is quite familiar with science and space issues and joined the team in order to help the script become more professional and more sophisticated. This was indeed one of the intentions of our new show #billionsuns – forming an enthralling story around prosaic facts and putting the science behind a space mission into context.
Dr. Björn Voss is our chief astronomy adviser. With 15 years of planetarium experience and a PhD in stellar astrophysics, Björn is the ideal team member for astronomical questions and all the Millions of details, which will shape the substance of our new show #billionsuns. Even more, Björn has been working on the ‘real’ Gaia space mission years ago and runs, as its director, Europe’s first and only 8K Fulldome planetarium in Münster, Germany. He has been consulting our previous show Edge of the Universe and number of other planetarium shows, emphasizing accurate science visualization. All along the project, Björn will keep his eyes on content, visualization and the fidelity of the visualization, as he did during the scripting phase.
Jens Ravens is the creator of our new show website www.planetariumshow.eu. Jens was just a month old, when the Hipparcos satellite was launched in 1989 and learned his first programming at the age of twelve. Later, he moved from his hometown Eystrup to Berlin and begun studying astrophysics and informatics. He has been programming for the iPhone ever since it is on the market, as well as for websites and apps. Jens has introduced the great idea of parallaxes into our new planetarium show website, which finally resulted in nicely shifting layers backing the main menu made of a star constellation.
Jens Fischer is our composer and musical director – as he has been in our previous show ‘Edge of the Universe’. Jens has studied music in Hannover, and has co-founded in the late 70s Tri Atma, one of the first European world-music bands. During the 80s he has been working as a professional guitarist, both live and in the studio. He has performed with a variety of bands and artists, and produced numerous CDs featuring his own instrumental music, before starting his career as a TV film composer in the 90s. Since then, he has set a number of TV documentaries and series to music, as well as radio dramas, sound installations and planetarium shows. Finding the right balance between education and emotion for our new show #billionsuns will be a demanding task. A special focus has been set to the almost 15 minutes of our journey through the Milky Way, which will be a little ‘symphony’ by itself.
Adam Majorosi is the show director and story writer. With his experience from the previous Fulldome show ‚Edge of the Universe‘, Adam has started years ago with promoting the idea of a show for the Gaia mission - and finally has been rewarded with the involvement of ESA as the major partner, plus almost 30 planetariums from all over Europe. Adam has been working for ESA and other clients since 20 years, producing content and video products for any sort of scientific topic. He has investigated the subject of measurig the Universe and composed the story of the show in all its details. As the production started finally in March 2013, Adam has directed the 3D and audio making from Berlin, ensuring the quality of content, images and music is fitting the high level of expectations by planetariums and audience. End of 2013, Adam has pushed the show marketing and PR forward, and he will carry on with marketing the show to more planetariums in the world.