Spark: The Universe in Us
Senior Producer
California Academy of Sciences
Visualization Studio
Fulldome Film 2023
Narrated by Diego Luna
(in both English & Spanish)
Where did the building blocks of life come from? The answer lies in the hearts of distant stars and incredibly powerful explosions such as supernovae, which help spread fundamental elements to galaxies far and wide where they can spark new life.
Computer generated images of Horsetail Falls in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Lake Tahoe. | California Academy of Sciences / USGS National Map / USDA National Agricultural Imaging Program
We introduce a series of size comparisons, illustrated in a drawing style that contrasts with the photorealistic visualizations that appear in the show. | California Academy of Sciences)
A supernova turns a star inside out, scattering an abundance of elements into space. Cassiopeia A is one such supernova remnant, and this visualization shows a computer simulation of that object, replicating a view in x-rays. | California Academy of Sciences / Salvatore Orlando, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
In the final seconds before a supermassive star explodes, its central core collapses, creating a chaotic superheated region just above. In this image, more disordered (higher entropy) regions appear brighter, revealing the turbulent region that will eventually expand to tear the star apart. | California Academy of Sciences / Kuo-Chuan Pan
The center of a supermassive star about to go supernova is a chaotic place! This image shows a computer simulation of the shell burning process near the core of a red supergiant, color-coded by the elements present: carbon appears in deep blue, oxygen in green, and silicon in yellow. The star’s iron core is seen at the very center of the image. | California Academy of Sciences / Carl Fields, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Earth’s habitability depends on many elements—not just the hydrogran and oxygen in our water and air or the carbon in living organisms, but also the iron and nickel in our planet’s core and the thorium and uranium that keep our planet warm. | California Academy of Sciences / Nathan Simmons / Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Exploded stellar giants leave behind their ultradense cores—so-called “neutron stars,” so compact that they bend light around them, similar to black holes. This science-driven artist’s interpretation shows two neutron stars that have cooled off and entered into a gravitational death spiral that will end in their mutual annihilation—and the formation of exotic elements, including the thorium and uranium that help keep Earth from cooling off and becoming a potentially lifeless world. | California Academy of Sciences
Computer simulations can take us billions of years back in time, tracing the origins of elements that would eventually form the Sun and planets—Earth and us! This image shows how our galaxy might have looked billions of years ago, before the Solar System formed. Lines trace material from our cosmic birthplace backward in time to its origins. | California Academy of Sciences / Cameron Hummels / Phil Hopkins / Feedback in Realistic Environments
The planetarium show Spark begins and ends in the Sierra Nevadas—at a human scale that grounds audiences in the world around us. Elements in the rocks, plants, water, and air originated inside distant stars, and the familiar setting helps make a recognizable connection to the abstract ideas in the rest of the show. Recreating an immersive view of this location demanded a wide range of visual effects tools and techniques. | California Academy of Sciences / USGS National Map / USDA National Agricultural Imaging Program
About the production…
Notes on Milky Way Formation:
Technical background: Keyframes of a time lapse animation of the Milky Way spanning 3 billion years backward in time from 4.6 to 7.6 billion years ago. The animation was derived from approximately 1.6 terabytes of simulation data, composed of multiple "snapshots'' of time separated by approximately 25 million years, with each snapshot containing approximately 130 million points. The snapshots were time interpolated in the animation software, Houdini, to create a smooth two-minute plus long animation where each second of play equals 20 million years.
Notes on Sierra Nevadas:
Technical background: Computer generated images of Horsetail Falls in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Lake Tahoe. Since drone photography is not allowed in Desolation Wilderness, the Academy’s Visualization Studio used a lightweight Insta360 RS-ONE video camera at the end of a long carbon fiber pole to “3D scan” the waterfall gorge of the opening scene. This was a novel technique, with the advantage being that the omnidirectional nature of the camera allowed continuous video of the surrounding environment without having to point the camera in a specific direction, while carefully walking along the edge of the gorge with the camera peering into it from above. The resulting 360° video was fed into the photogrammetry software Agisoft Metashape to construct a complete texture mapped CGI model of the gorge. The wider landscape extending beyond the gorge was modeled using geospatial data from USGS and USDA, and populated with off-the-shelf 3D models of trees and plants. The waterfalls were simulated in Houdini and the scene layout and rendering were done in Blender.