SonicVision
digitally animated planetarium music show
SonicVision is a digitally animated planetarium music show featuring 38 minutes of music from 17 different musical artists. The content of the animation includes visions of astronomy and space travel as well as abstractions, mandalic imagery, and visual puns. It is a descendant of the laser light shows popular at planetariums in the 1980s and 1990s. As a fully digitally animated music show in a planetarium half-sphere video format, SonicVision is likely the first of its kind anywhere in the world.
In association with MTV2, several VJs and many animators worked to create the visual content for the 7-projector digital projection system at the Hayden Planetarium in New York's American Museum of Natural History. Software used to animate SonicVision included Maya, SoftImage, FilmBox, Adobe After Effects, and Shake. Sponsorship from Sun Microsystems included the donation of much of the computing power necessary to render the animation.
The creative director of SonicVision was Chris Harvey, who drew on cosmic, mystical, and mandalic imagery as well as visions of alien civilizations and distant worlds to bring the half-sphere format to life. Other contributing artists and animators include Benton C Bainbridge, Madame Chao, V. Owen Bush (also Lead Compositor of SonicVision), Mark Bajuk, Carter Emmart, Ed Manning, Bruce Gionet, Matt Pursley, Joshua Minges, Andrew Harper, Doug Vitarelli, and Erik Wesselak. Curious Pictures, Bionic Dots, and Atmospherex also created animations for the project.
The public source identifies “SonicVision” as digitally animated planetarium music show. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around SonicVision, digitally and animated.
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This entry incorporates text from “SonicVision” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.