Speaker(s):

Abstract: This submission is a one-hour behind-the-scenes Talk associated with our two Electronic Theater pieces: “‘Birth of Planet Earth’ Fulldome Excerpt: Photosynthesis in a Chromatophore” and “‘Birth of Planet Earth’ Fulldome Excerpt: The Collision that Formed the Moon”. In this talk, members of the Advanced Visualization Lab from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will discuss challenges of producing 15 minutes of data-driven cinematic visualization to tell the epic story of the history of Planet Earth in the new fulldome documentary “Birth of Planet Earth”. The film features scientific visualizations of an evolving Milky Way galaxy filled with explosive supernovae, a journey into our evolving Solar System with a disk of violently colliding rocks and early planets, a close up view of the giant impact that created the moon, a tour through quantum-mechanical process of photosynthesis, and a look back at our modern planet through the photographic lenses of a satellite. These visualizations required innovations in data science, camera choreography, procedural effects, visual design, and compositing which the team will break down and discuss through a variety of visual examples.

Speaker(s) Bio: Robert Patterson, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States of America
Robert Patterson is a visualization designer at NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Lab and Associate Director for Production of the eDream Institute. For over 25 years, he has collaborated with scientists to produce visualizations for informal science education. Patterson choreographed and art directed visualizations that have appeared in NOVA, Discovery Channel, IMAX 3D and planetarium productions. Patterson co-created Virtual Director, a tool that enables voice and gesture-controlled navigation and camera choreography for collaborative design of visualizations. He creates cinematic presentations of scientific data in astrophysics, astronomy, networking, atmospheric science, and oceanography for stereoscopic 3D and UHD displays to inspire broad public audiences.

Donna Cox, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States of America
Dr. Donna J. Cox, MFA, is the first Michael Aiken Chair, Director of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, the Research & Education division, and the eDream Institute at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; and Professor School of Art+Design, University of Illinois. She and her collaborators millions with cinematic presentations of science in international fulldome digital museum shows, IMAX movies, and feature films. She is co-editor and contributor to “New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts” (2018). She’s received numerous awards. ACM SIGGRAPH awarded her the distinguished lifetime achievement award for digital art, July 2019.

AJ Christensen, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States of America
AJ Christensen is a visualization programmer for the Advanced Visualization Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He focuses on scripting, scene design, derived data, and data flow, and is a programmer-designer for visual effects tools like Houdini and Nuke. In addition to his film credits with the AVL, he contributed to the Oscar winning science-inspired renderings of gravitational lensing around a black hole in the film “Interstellar” with effects studio Double Negative.

Kalina Borkiewicz, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States of America
Kalina Borkiewicz is a visualization research programmer in the Advanced Visualization Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where she writes software that processes and visualizes various types of massive scientific data. She recently created the open-source software Ytini to make visualization tools freely available to artists and scientists. Kalina contributed to the creation of such films as "A Beautiful Planet" (IMAX), "Solar Superstorms" (fulldome), and "Seeing the Beginning of Time" (4K). She gave a talk at TEDxUIUC, a local chapter of the TED conference, describing her path as a woman engineer.