Producing a CG planetarium show at Griffith Observatory

DAWN FIDRICK: Welcome to my industry talk, Producing a CG Planetarium Show at Griffith Observatory. This talk is intended to serve content producers who are looking to build an animation production studio, a pipeline, and even to mount a show. It's meant to focus on the producer's role. And to give an overview on how she plans for all stages of CG production.

We'll be learning through the lens of Griffith Observatory's new planetarium show, Signs of Life. So let's start with the trailer.

NARRATOR: Life abounds on Earth, but could it survive hidden in the sands of Mars, inside the misty jets of Enceladus, within the methane seas of Titan, or on the thousands of planets we've discovered orbiting other stars? Join us in the search for signs of life.

[SWELLING MUSIC PLAYING]

DAWN FIDRICK: I am so excited for you to see this show at Griffith Observatory. And so I want to start off by setting the stage a bit and talk about where and how the show was produced. The challenge came in 2016 when I was invited to join the production team to produce Griffith Observatory's new planetarium show.

They wanted to make a new show that was more ambitious than any other that they had created. It had been about a decade since the last flagship show. And so they knew they needed to build a new animation production studio. And they wanted to do it in house.

This is a legacy of Griffith Observatory that all planetarium shows that are screened there are built and created by Griffith Observatory. To accomplish the goal of delivering an original full CG 8k production is a huge challenge. And we agreed that this would be an epic undertaking for the institution. But that it was one well worth doing.

And so, I could spend hours telling you about the entire process. But we have 30 minutes today. And I want to set up some of the learning objectives that we're going to be able to cover.

First, the importance of context. Producing is an array of a lot of responsibilities. And in order to get the context of who your employer is, how things are set up, it's going to be much smoother. So I want to talk to you about the context in producing.

Secondly, I want to kick you off on how to start planning for an animation and VFX production pipeline, if you hadn't done that before. As well as how to start drafting a production plan.

And third, which may be the most important key ingredient, building your team. Any creative and technical endeavor is a huge undertaking. And it's the team, and that kind of collaboration, that's really going to make the difference in the final product.

So starting off with context, you may know that Griffith Observatory is an iconic institution. They pioneered programs in space travel and innovations and special effects in the planetarium. It opened in 1935. The planetarium then was the third in the United States and the first in the Pacific Rim.

The star of the theater initially was the Zeiss Mark II star projector, which wowed audiences from its ability to produce the night sky. The dome was plaster at that time, it was state of the art. It's a 75 foot diameter dome, which is just huge-- immense, when you're inside of it. One of the largest in the world.

The observatory pioneered programs on space travel, and really going to other worlds that we hadn't been to or had any imagery of. The original projector was replaced with the new Mark IV star projector in 1964.

And then there was a big renovation from 2002 to 2006, where the theater was transformed into the Samuel Oschin Planetarium that it is today. It was updated with the latest technology then of projectors, the dome, covering the sound, lighting, and seating. And then the third Zeiss Universarium Mark IX star projector, using fiber optic technology, was installed.

And then it was renovated once again in 2014, in anticipation of Signs of Life, with new projectors and a sound system to enable a 28.1 surround sound. I tell you when you go into the Samuel Oschin Planetarium and the lights go down, your eyes become dark adapted to the space, something happens within you. You look up at what is the night sky, which a lot of us who live in cities have never seen before.

And for me, the best way I can really describe that to you, is it's a sense of home. And it's about a story of who we are. One really unique thing in this planetarium is that there's a live performer telling you a story about the sky. And Griffith Observatory has been doing this for about 85 years. And this tradition goes back thousands of years, when we would gather around a campfire and tell stories about what we saw and to try to make sense of the night sky.

So Griffith Observatory, for context, is to know that they tell stories about the sky. We wanted to continue to do this with Signs of Life. And ask really big questions. Questions like, who are we? And why are we here? And why does the universe look the way it does? These big questions, along with knowledge that there will be a live presenter conveying astronomical information with passion, is something I needed to know as a producer when putting together this project and outlining a plan to execute it. So for me, that was key context.

I also have a passion for producing. Any producer will know that. And if you're out there looking to get into production, you will know quickly whether producing is for you. I also have a passion for astronomy and animation and technology. And it's a good thing because the technology for Signs of Life is enormous. More than the scale that I had ever done or that Griffith Observatory had ever attempted.

It's a 35 minute show. Like I said, projected on the 75 foot planetarium dome. That's a pixel resolution of 8,192 by 8,192. It's rendered photorealistic and projected at 60 frames per second. In the end, this means approximately 126,000 8k dome masters.

The image on the right is a dome master. And it's made up of one-- the final show is made up of 126,000 in an image stack. This took an enormous amount of coordination and collaboration, not to mention machine power. It's a good thing I have a passion for this because it's the responsibility-- it became my responsibility to deliver all 126,000 frames on time and on budget.

Every event in our lives leads up to the present moment. And this, for me, certainly did. My training in production management, my days in the live theatrical stage managing, calling shows at Blue Man Group in New York, my experience creating an independent thriller feature film, Other Madnesses, hours spent rotoscoping on films like Iron Man and Wolverine and Star Trek-- they all feed into my passion for arts and for the sciences, for performance, and computer animation, and astronomy.

As a producer, all of these things led me to my dream job. Here I am at the studio in its finished state in production. But of course, I didn't do this alone. There were countless cast and crew.

But I want to highlight and acknowledge and recognize the other producers that aren't speaking here in this talk today, but are very much part of the process in order to make this show. In fact, many of them were on the show before I was. And so you can read the names there. The rest of the cast and crew is on the IMDB page. You can Google it there.

So we're going to move on to the main event. What exactly does a producer do? And how did we produce this show? A producer initiates coordinates and supervises and controls just about every aspect of the production process.

I have this slide here to Gee It's almost a 24 hour type of job. You're always thinking about it. It's important to take some mental and physical breaks, of course. But it's really one of organization. And when I say organization, I mean metaphorically and physically. Organizing thoughts, physical things, items, and then communicating them. Communicating what those tasks are, putting them into categories, and then finally, the thread that connects each of them together.

You need to be able to articulate. And I found, with the team during Signs of Life, that the more in sync we were, the more informed we were, the better we were able to understand how each event or each task affected others upstream or downstream. It's really a web of information. And producers are great at this.

Great producers can see things in the micro sense, in the macro sense. And really be able to concisely edit information or expand on it based in the conversation they're speaking to or whom they're giving information to. And so, there's always more to learn.

And so, I'll move on to one of the very first steps, which is gathering information. This is really key. This plays into context. You want to meet everyone. You want to know who all of the people are.

For Signs of Life, Griffith Observatory is owned by the city of Los Angeles. It is part of the Department of Recreation and Parks. And this was really a public-private partnership along with the nonprofit, Griffith Observatory Foundation. And so, I took a lot of time to explore the space, research, seed relationships, talk to as many people, and know what the expectations are, and to know the guidelines that we are able to work within.

There are also a lot of other information to gather from science advisors and technology partners, people who I drew from my current network or reached out and brought them in to being part of this show. You're going to talk to your team. And I find that being present, listening as much as possible, asking as many questions to understand, which each member needs, is really a role of a producer in any project.

And of course, reading the room. Read the room about where people are, what they need. This is a photo of our production manager, Caroline Manning, and our visual effects supervisor, Gee Yeung. You can read the room and say, they're pretty intense. They have a lot that they're thinking about right now. Maybe now is a good time to ask them if they could use some help, rather than to ask them to give me something that I need.

Also, you will find, and I certainly did during production, it starts to take on a life of its own. You begin researching and collaborating, setting different groups up to talk with each other, gathering that information, pulling it back around, inputting it into shot grid, and then channeling it back out again. I'm a big note taker. This is just a sample of six of my notebooks during the process of the film, or the show.

And taking notes, I find that even if you don't go back and read them, the act of actually writing them down seals them into your memory. And you're able to recall them much more. Of course, being able to use your notebooks to recall information is invaluable. And I'm a huge advocate of that. I did come of age in the 90s. And so, I still really do like the art of handwriting. Although technology is my best friend.

So let's move into planning. A production plan is key. So some of the things that we talked about when we gathered information and context is going to feed into a producer's list of assumptions. And that list of assumptions is going to be your boundary box that you're going to work within. The show has to be 35 minutes maximum. It has to be delivered in May of 2020. The frame rate is going to be 60 frames per second. Money, the budget, is x amount.

These are the key components that you'll need to frame the rest of the production plan around. And so that will enable you to start creating a master schedule. This master schedule will have every-- this is the sample master schedule that I created for Signs of Life. It has every department, every stage of production.

And it's really my best guess, at that stage, where things were going to overlap, when they were going to start and end. And I used it to collaborate with the rest of the team, have conversations about their experience, what they thought. And then, it's an ever moving schedule based on that feedback that you're getting from your team.

A crew plan is crucial in your production plan. It also includes all the stages of production. It's also your best guess. And it includes all the departments and their roles. You're putting that in, as I did here, best guess for where it's going to fall. And then, you're moving that information as you gather more facts.

So building the team is one of the joys of my life for this show. Gee Yeung, the visual effects supervisor, and I had a terrific time meeting with great people, building a collaborative group that we knew we could work with, artists. A lot of the team was already in place before Gee and I even got there, art director, Don Dixon, astronomical Illustrator, Chris Butler.

And I could go through and tell you all the things I love about each one of these people. But they all played a significant role in making sure the production got done. There's a synergy that happens amongst a well-planned and curated teams. You really want to look for people who are open to feedback, who enjoy collaborating with others, where ego is removed in any creative environment.

Really as a producer, I wanted to create a nurturing environment, where we would be able to do our best work. And then, that feeds into the final product. So you have to make sure you keep a sense of humor.

And this is our animation supervisor, Ruel. We had an inside joke about unicorns. And it's important to have fun, have lunch together, get to know each other, know what's happening in each other's lives. This all feeds into the creative work that you're doing. Go to outside events when you can. And really enjoy each other's company. And in the end, you can feel all of that in the final product.

And through all of this, you're really going to be creating things like this. Chicken scratch drawings, where you're saying, well what if this works? Or what if that works? Or how does this affect the other upstream or downstream?

And that kind of research and development, at the beginning of production, is going to allow you to come up with a pipeline schematic like this one. This is the final pipeline schematic that we used to implement shotgun-- or shot grid, rather, as the tool kit underneath our production pipeline. And you can see each department is represented, how things flow from one another, what the formats are, and how each stage of production leads to the next.

I could spend a whole 30 minutes talking about budget. But I want to give you one nugget here, which is this resource tool. This is a fantastic book, Producing Animation, for many reasons. But I show you this here because the chart of accounts that are listed in this book is phenomenal. It's really detailed. And I have found it really useful to jog my budget. To know which things I'm going to include, which things I'm not. And don't forget contingency. Always include a contingency in your budget.

I want to tell you a little bit more about building the studio. The studio we affectionately called the satellite studio, which is a studio that is in Griffith Park, not in the observatory itself. The city of Los Angeles owns the park and therefore, the facility. We couldn't have built it, obviously, without them. And had a really great experience learning things that I never thought I would learn. About air conditioning, about maintenance, about all of these things.

At the core of any CG production is systems. And our systems administrator, Benjamin Roudenis, is a phenomenal person and talented individual. He came up with this diagram through discussion with the rest of the team about what we would need. This is one small diagram of a much larger system in place to help with tracking and understanding of how the pipeline and the system is built.

And then we start construction. These are some images of the fiber being pulled up from the ground, out through the ceiling, electrical work for the render farm. The mini dome is our review dome that's used for dailies. And you'll see a video about that later. Here it is being built. In the render farm, you can see the individuals queuing things up, setting it up, maintaining the farm, it's really cold in there. You can see producer director, Bob Niemack, is pretty cold.

And we really had a great time supporting each other and making sure that things work. But sometimes they don't. Sometimes challenges happen. And you can see by these three images, we had all three of these challenges. We had the air conditioning go out. Los Angeles is a hot environment. We had some really hot summers and air conditioning locked up. Render farm was running and we had a procedure to make sure it got shut down properly, so the machines were saved.

And then, we had ants every July. We're located in a park. They came up through the data ports. And as a producer, I'm responsible for noticing this, acknowledging it, gathering information, and problem solving-- finding a solution to it. The last image, forest fires unfortunately. Wildfires are a reality here in Southern California. And we had one really close in the park by the zoo.

This is an image here. We knew this could happen. So we created a backup plan, where we knew we could roll off a duplicate of the server and put it into the back of a car, drive it away. Thank goodness the wildfire did not reach our studio. But we were prepared and we did have to utilize that protocol once.

So just going back to the beginnings of building a studio and the end. This is us in production. After all of those conversations happened, all of the collaboration amongst the team, us in production.

So let's move on to the show part of things, how we built the show. This is a diagram I just adore. You can see, it's credited here. And I think it is just a fantastic example of how to visualize 3D production. If you aren't familiar with it, each individual illustration-- you can see, gives you a good representation of what that might entail.

And then breaks it up into some of the three stages of production. I have four stages of production that I've broken it out for us for Signs of Life. These are big milestone markers that we couldn't move to the next stage until final pieces from the previous stage were completed.

I'm going to go through these. There's more information in the handout. So I'm not going to go through each item. I'll just give you an overview. Development and preparation and setup is really taking all that information that you gathered, context, all of the talking and listening that you did, all the nodes that I took, were all fed into these kinds of documents and plans.

We had the opportunity to go to JPL, where we could see the building of the Mars Rover that's currently on Mars now. There was a lot of planning going into how shots would be created. It's really important that they're astronomically correct at Griffith Observatory. And so we leaned on our science advisors. We leaned on our in-house astronomers and illustrators to map them out.

A key part of my job, as a producer, is to break down the script. Once the script is finalized I have conversations with the production manager, the visual effects supervisor, and others on the team to talk about where the breaks are in the script. The complexity of each shot, we label shots, give them codes, best practices, naming conventions for the systems team, and for tracking and shot grid. And then we bid out the hours it's going to take that we believe to pull this off.

Here are the stats that came out of Signs of Life script breakdown. You can see there were 18 sequences over 35 minutes. That was 45 shots. Yes, they are long shots with long frame counts. Again, we talked before about the estimated number of total frames, 126,000. And there are 234 assets that needed to be built in CG.

So this is your place. And was the place I was at when I input things into shot grid and said, how are we going to produce this? And on what timeline? Then that takes us into some really fun parts of production, pacing and timing.

The editorial department, the storyboard artists, are phenomenal. We had such a great time crafting each shot. And it's made up of frames, drawings of images that are placed into an editorial timeline. And we get to feel the shape of the show start, the pacing, and the timing. Add some temp music and start to get an idea of the mood, and the emotion, and where the script dialogue lands. Still thinking about that live performer, how they're going to be able to repeat this in a live environment.

The art department starts color scripting, looking at data from NASA and other sources for data sets on landing sites and where we're going to fly the camera. And then, we start prevising that. Previs is the first stage, if you're not familiar with it, of visualizing in 3D a camera. And I have a little video of us in the editorial suite working this out.

DON DIXON: We see the sun lighting up the Galapagos right now. So there's like a crescent Earth. And let's say we're up high, so you can see it all. We're getting the reflection, the glint, off the ocean.

BOB NIEMACK: And we're moving this way.

DON DIXON: Yeah, so we're moving this way. All right, so now we're going to get a sunset.

BOB NIEMACK: Yeah, you don't have to move?

DON DIXON: No, you--

BOB NIEMACK: He has to move.

DON DIXON: Yeah.

BOB NIEMACK: Sun never moves.

DON DIXON: Sun does not move-- Copernicus.

DAWN FIDRICK: And this is a final still from the shot that was being prevised by directors Don Dixon and Bob Niemack with editor, Fred. Every shot goes through this previs scenario. It's all tracked. These are just some of the white boards outside of our production tracking and shot grid.

Then a shot schedule I created based on those previs frame counts. We start moving into production. This is the time when all the information I've gathered, all the conversations we've had-- it's time to push the big red button and really drive it home and start building the show in all of these departments. The pipeline comes back here. Remember, we talked about where things are flowing. So this is when it's built and we start really using it.

This is one example of a character that was created. Our dog for the show. And this is the turntable of its groom created by Shane Chambers. I'm going to play that once more for you because it's adorable. And just a view of the studio, us in production. A visual effects asset being created here in different passes for compositing.

After a while production takes on a life of its own. It just starts happening around you. Once you've done all of that prepro, and all of that work, you just start seeing people huddled in places working, talking and it's really a thrill.

Another component that we talked about was the live presenter. And so we keep this in mind. There was a prop that needed to be revisited and rebuilt. This is us beginning to do that. Going up to the observatory from the satellite studio was always a pleasure each week.

And then, here is us building a motion capture studio in our foyer. And it will make more sense when I show you the final image here of the girl looking through the magnifying glass at a fly with her dog. And I'll just toggle that for you, so you can see how it was set up a bit. The performer here has the motion capture suit on. And we captured animation in order to import that to the 3D characters.

We created templates in shot grid to track all of these things. Shots and asset template examples here. Tracking their status was paramount. I couldn't keep all of it in my brain. Being able to track it, share it, update it in real time enabled us to finish the show on time and on budget.

Like I said, we got to go to the planetarium each week on Mondays for reviews, taking it up to the space that is ultimately where it will be delivered. Our reviews were done in RV. And we also utilized the playlists in our mini dome. And so, I have a video here of how dailies work.

[SWELLING MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome to Griffith Observatory's satellite studio. This is the animation studio where we are creating the next planetarium show, Signs of Life. One of the most interesting things in the studio is the mini dome.

The mini dome is a 13 foot small dome that mirrors the Samuel Oschin Planetarium. It is where we do dailies every day. Our production manager, Caroline Manning, creates the playlists in the morning. The artists submit their shots for review. They usually pass through Gee Yeung, our visual effects supervisor. And then, we get the director's feedback and notes here inside the mini dome.

BOB NIEMACK: Nice transition. Claire, we're straight.

DON DIXON: In a conventional film you have a frame. You can bring the subject of your picture into the field of view and take it out of it. You don't have to worry about what's behind the camera. In a dome show, you do. Because it's a 180 degree fisheye. And so the audience can turn around and look to see where they have been, as well as where they are going. So you have to compose every shot with that in view.

PRESENTER 1: At what point does the fly start moving?

PRESENTER 2: He flaps his wings right over there.

PRESENTER 1: Right before you punch in it.

PRESENTER 2: Is he moving now?

PRESENTER 1: No, I don't think he moves until he flaps his wings.

BOB NIEMACK: Griffith Observatory, its philosophy is that the planetarium dome is an environment, it's not a screen. The key to that is having transitions that don't look like a movie, that keep you in an environment and move you to the next environment without telling you it's a fade out, it's a cut, it's a dissolve. So in our show, 34 minutes long, we have over 30 of these transitions that seamlessly take you from one place to another.

BRINTON: When we're coming in to the dew drop, we're going straight. And then once we're in the microbial world we're sort of tilted up and raking across the top of the dome. So we need to find some way to transition from doing this to doing this to transition. I'll show you what this looks like here.

PRESENTER 4: That's seamless on the first--

PRESENTER 5: Magic. It works.

PRESENTER 4: Can we see it again?

BRINTON: Yeah.

BOB NIEMACK: My favorite transition is also my favorite scene. And that is, we start at the bottom of the ocean, we catapult up through the ocean out the top of the ocean, up through the clouds, up to the outer atmosphere, tilt down, and we see the Earth. And the music swells and I'm filled with joy.

[SWELLING MUSIC PLAYING]

DR. E. C. KRUPP: A theater like the Samuel Oschin Planetarium is incredibly complicated. People have no idea and we don't want them to have an idea. We want them to go in and not even be aware of the extraordinary technological magic that's taking place there. We want them to be immersed in the experience.

PRESENTER 6: Is anybody out there? If so? Where are they? What are they like?

DR. E. C. KRUPP: But it takes technological magic to make all of that happen. And so I'm looking forward to that point when audiences spontaneously are applauding at the conclusion of the show, thinking that's just about the best thing I've seen in life.

DAWN FIDRICK: And we're in the homestretch post-production, almost the last stage. What you saw, this gentleman, Brinton, was compositing. He composited these shots. And I want to show you a breakdown of another shot being composited to illustrate that process.

[TIMESPACE MUSIC PLAYING]

That shot is stunning when you're immersed in that 60 story, 75 foot dome. And here is the sound crew on the final mix. Like I had mentioned before, there's a 28.1 surround sound that you get to enjoy when you're immersed seeing the show.

And then, final delivery time. It's showtime! We're out of time. Uniquely for the Samuel Oschin Planetarium, we have to slice the 8k image for the six projectors that align along the spring line. As a producer, you're also going to need to think about data management throughout the whole process, not just the end.

Archiving, though at the end, and your master deliverables list for future people. A lot of that tracking we did in shot grid. We created a data location and then we set up an automated-- or our pipeline TD, Scott Ballard, set up the slicing of the tickets or slicing of the show. We call them slice tickets.

I have had an extraordinary time creating this show. I hope that you have the opportunity to see it. And it's been a pleasure to share it with you today. I look forward to connecting with you at the Q&A.