Life: A Cosmic Story

In Life: A Cosmic Story take a high-speed tour of key events since the Big Bang that set the stage for life.

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Type: Feature show
Genre: Documentary
Release date: November 2010

Directed by: Ryan Wyatt

FLAT TRAILER
FISHEYE TRAILER
FULL PREVIEW

Awards

2000
Jackson Hole
Best Fulldome Program
Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival
2000
Jena
Best Intergration of Scientific Data
Jena Fulldome Festival
2000
Jena
Best in Narration
Jena Fulldome Festival

Description

The show begins in a redwood forest, with the sounds of wind and life. One redwood looms large, until we approach its branches and enter one of its leaves, adjusting our perspective to microscopic scales inside a cell. We see a pared-down version of its inner workings, learning about the process of photosynthesis and the role of DNA. This scene sets the stage for the story of life.

We then leap backward billions of years to the origin of elements themselves. The early Universe contained mostly dark matter, which drew hydrogen and helium together to form the first stars. The carbon and heavier elements required by living organisms came from generations of stars.

We continue our journey, diving into the Milky Way Galaxy of several billion years ago. We approach a region in which stars are forming, where we encounter a protoplanetary disk surrounding our newborn Sun. We arrive at the young Earth, splashing down in deep water to visit a hydrothermal vent and to examine the formation of organic molecules. We then travel above a volcanic island to encounter an enriched “hot puddle” of water, in which nucleotides may have wrapped themselves in protective vesicles. Once life took hold, it radically changed our planet. Earth’s early microorganisms created our oxygen atmosphere—and may have also triggered a global ice age, causing temperatures to drop precipitously and nearly freezing out life on our planet. We continue leaping forward in time, viewing the movement of continents and the changing environment for life, until we reach modern Earth.

We return home to look at Earth once more, circling the modern globe to review the evidence for the story we have heard. Much of what we understand about evolution we have pieced together from the fossil record, but we can also reassemble evolutionary history by studying life that surrounds us today. All life shares a common ancestry and common chemistry, all related at the molecular level. As we learn this, we pull away from individual images of life, and we end the show as we see their three-dimensional distribution form the double-helix strand of DNA. The audience is left immersed inside a representation of the structure of life’s shared origins.

For planetariums and digital dome theatres.

Distributors

You can get this show from:
Loch Ness Productions
Audio Visual Imagineering
Evans & Sutherland
Fulldome Film Society
RSA Cosmos
Sky-Skan International
ZEISS
Sky-Skan Europe GmbH

Show details

Shorter version runtime : not available
Full version runtime: 26 minutes
Suitable for: General audience
Target audience: 6 - 13, 14 - 18, Adults
License: Traditional license
Resource & materials: Guide for educators, Poster

Technical specifications

Video format: Fulldome, Flat screen
Resolution: 1K, 3K, 4K
Frame rate: 29.97 fps, 30 fps
Show orientation: Unidirectional
Stereo 3D: None
Production technologies:
Audio format: Stereo
Languages: English, German, Japanese

Production & Support

Produced by

Credits

Director Writer
Distributor

Screened at 3 dome theaters and counting...

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