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  1. #41
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    Quote Originally Posted by mixedgas View Post
    snip
    Call it "Audience Handling" or "Audience Manipulation", if you want return customers, you need to figure out a way to be novel and stimulating.
    Steve
    How about "Audience Seduction"?

    - - - Updated - - -

    A planetarium is such an elegant concept. It's simply a white hemispherical dome with an instrument in the center to project all the visible stars and planets. Unfortunately that's just the starting point, and lots of people never get past the starting point. There are two extremes to the planetarium spectrum. One end is a "holodeck" where you're only limited by your imagination and technology. This end of the spectrum is unpopulated btw. The other END is a place where someone (Visualize Cliff from Cheers) drones on and on in the dark about greek and roman creation myths. Sadly the majority of people who seek out planetariums on their own (Visualize Cliff again) actually like it when someone drones on in the dark, and they complain if they don't get what they expect. It's hard to design a marketing plan to attract people who have never been bitten by the greek and roman myth bug to come to what they suspect is going to be a snooze fest. It's VERY HARD to get them to come back again. So you might as well reduce the number of seats in the theater! It's the very definition of HARD to produce a great show with wide appeal. But if somehow you manage to do it you'll be lucky if the president of the science center bothers to see it. The Science Center's middle management might make it to the planetarium once every couple of years, or proudly boast that they don't remember the last time they saw a show. And the majority of the people who DO come to see your new show are going to be just like Cliff because the marketing department didn't bother to see the show either, and the marketing (if any) will reflect the entire institution's lack of interest.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  2. #42
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    Quote Originally Posted by AnAnonymousParty View Post
    I remember when McDonnell Planetarium got the DigiStar, going to see it when it first started operating and thinking, "boy that thing sucks, I hope they get it tuned in and focused once they get some experience with it". snip
    I think you're being a little (not a lot!) too hard on the McDonnell Planetarium. Nobody there decided to get the 1st generation Digistar, and E&S should have known better than to put one in a 60 foot dome. The Digistar was a gift from a great donor who meant well. And the staff during the early days did some great shows. Today they have the best opto-mechanical planetarium projector in the world. Granted when they put the Zeiss Universarium & 80 foot dome in they broke the rest of the building including the star theater, but it wasn't the planetarium staff that made all those decisions that conspired to turn an architectural tour de force into something that's anything but...

    Non profit Museums are hard. There are forces pulling seemingly in every direction at once. The Board of Directors, various curators, security, staff, vendors, businesses, politicians, patrons, volunteers, and the general public all clamoring - "do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign!!!" The safest course in an environment like that is just to keep your head down, because the squeaky wheels get fired. Bob Cassilly changed The City Museum into a "for profit" venture because he decided he never wanted to go to a board meeting ever again, but he listened to his Muse and the public...

    I didn't go to a few shows in the recent Laserium run in St. Louis. I was there for all of them, and I met lots of kids who loved the show. One early teen confided that he didn't want to come, his parents "made" him. He said, "I had my pillow and thought I'll just go to sleep - then the show started and I thought - I'm not going to sleep!" I did the original Laserium shows, the same way I did them back in the 70 & 80's. Could I have done them better - the answer to that is always "Yes!" My experiment wasn't about updating the shows to the technology that's available today. That step is still in the future. Someone actually came up to Eric after a star show and said, "God it would be so cool if you brought back Laserium!" This was 10 months into the run - that's bad marketing. All of the things you mentioned are what makes marketing hard today. There's a world of difference between getting someone's attention, holding someone's attention, and loosing someone's attention.

    I would have loved to have the control console on the floor, but I really wanted the projector on the balcony. From a laser safety point of view I felt I needed to be next to the projector since the balcony wasn't a secure area. Occasionally people would ask to watch from upstairs - I don't think I ever said no.

    Laserium is a hard sell because nobody is listening, and it's indescribable. The best ads Laserium ever had were interviews of people who had just seen Laserium - they were funny and even though you didn't have the slightest idea what the hell they were talking about - you wanted to go. The truth is that if you invent a better mousetrap today - nobody is going to know about it unless you figure out how to market it.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  3. #43
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    Lumia

    The Mark IV projector that did "Laserium I" had two reflection lumia effects, one raw beam transmission lumia effect, four dispersed beam lumia effects, and a scan glass tray that covered all four scan pairs with whatever you wanted to scan through. The beam from a one watt Ion laser was dispersed by a prism and the diverging output was reflected off a galvanometer into a second prism that was adjusted to make the diverging red, yel, grn, & blue beams parallel again. From this point on there was a ribbon of 4 different color beams. The galvanometer between the prisms was for "colormod". With modern projectors you can do pretty much anything you want with color, but way back before PCAOMs, dpss, diode, and opsl color modulation was a little challenging.

    You could drive the colormod galvo with a variety of signals, and for many ancient laserists - colormod was our favorite effect. If you look at a photo of the mark 6 console there's one control right in the center of the control panel - It's not colormod, (that's a whole subsection on the lower right…) but it relates to colormod. This control was called the beam torquer. It allowed the operator to adjust the offset of the colormod galvo. If there was a little yellow in the red you could fix that right up. It had a wide range of adjustment. If you turned it far enough you wouldn't get any light on the dome at all. Somewhere between "way back when" and today someone decided to reduce the range by about a factor of 10. I understand why - if you didn't have any light on the dome and it was because you twisted the beam torquer all the way over and spent long seconds (while the music was playing!) looking for what the hell was wrong - the temptation to "fix" the problem would be huge. But there's a reason the beam torquer had the central position of honor. You see the beam torquer allowed the operator to play the lumia effects. More than just controlling the speed of effect wheels - the beam torquer allowed you to control the actual beam position passing through 5 out of the 7 lumia effects. (later 14/20) The beam torquer allowed the operator to take the lumia effects out of the tempo arena and move them into the performance arena. Lumia are a huge part of planetarium laser shows. So is subtle control of the lumia effects...
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  4. #44
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    Jumping back to the conversation about audiences then vs now, I'd argue it's essential to understand why LASERIUM stuck in the first place. First, I am not a LASERIUM insider, so my thoughts are purely from a distance. LASERIUM was escapism. It was all about coming as close as possible to leaving this planet, with or without medication, in a group setting. Hence the importance of the 'cosmic guide' or 'techno-yogi'- i.e., live laserist. Yes, LASERIUM was a cult of sorts, thus the importance of grass-roots, word-of-mouth marketing. Remember (if you can) what was going on in 1973. The US made going to the moon routine. NASA had the first probes snapping pics of Mercury and Jupiter. Bowie was channeling a bisexual alien in a different city every night. Elton John was going on about a rocket man. Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon. Basically a whole generation of Americans were preparing for the onset of a psychedelic space age; one where all earthly woes (including an unpopular war and Watergate) would be left behind after one's consciousness burst forth into a new reality in order to surf the rainbow-hued cosmos. Ivan's timing couldn't have been better, and in LA no less. LASERIUM gave the masses what they yearned for, brightly-colored alternate reality for an hour, for as long as they yearned it, just about 10 years.

    These are different times and today's audiences crave different things. The laser is still a device / medium that evokes wonder. That's good news. But therapeutic escapism is no longer the correct formulation of the medium. That's why I fear that aside from limited runs in familiar venues driven by nostalgia, the classic LASERIUM show formula, or anything resembling it, just won't have staying power of more than a year or so as a ticket-selling planetarium draw. The pieces - graphics, abstracts, lumia, beams - are the same, but the aim, the intent, needs to be different. That's why I also think the importance of live laserist control is overvalued (that's not to say that having a live emcee who engages the audience during the show doesn't add alot, but reproducibility is just more important). A different kind of planetarium laser show is the answer. The quickness with which SkyLase attendance drops off wherever it's been installed over the last few years is just further proof that previous formulas are no longer working. But nonetheless, wishing for Brian and Jon to make it happen.
    Last edited by clisotope; 04-24-2014 at 00:11.

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    Oh, and how could I forget Woody Allen - SLEEPER was released late 1973 as well. There you have it, LASERIUM, a coherently-powered orgasmatron for the masses.
    Last edited by clisotope; 04-23-2014 at 23:41.

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    Laserium was always intended to be an Abstract show. The intro to Laserium I said, "...Laserium is a trip through your imagination, to where you've never been, and you're about to embark! (Fade up Master Intensity with Chopper full on - fade out Chopper to "explode" the "Burn" effect as synthesizer sweep reaches crescendo...) Laserium wasn't intended to be interpreted in a specific way, or communicate a specific message. So your explanation about its success being tied to specific time and social scene is more about your specific trip through your imagination. It was Ivan's intent to produce, "…an experience - its effect upon you depends upon what you bring to it. If you seek entertainment, or relaxation you may likely find it. If you seek inspiration or hidden significance you may find it also, but if you want explanations and explicit meanings they will not be there." Ivan really meant all of that. Laserium shows and performances were measured by Ivan on a spectrum where "a trip through your imagination" was at one end of the spectrum and self indulgent crap at the other end. I suppose self indulgent crap is at one end of everybody's spectrum. The trick is making sure that simply crap isn't at the other end.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  7. #47
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    when did representational graphic sequences start creeping in?

    there are a lot of laserium videos on youtube and many of them have graphic sequences that are a little embarrassing by today's standards.

    http://youtu.be/N6bh9h_SDu4
    http://youtu.be/PwHkVBX0RY4
    http://youtu.be/b9BXcly9h4E

    to be fair, there were some full abstract shows that were not laserium at the top of their game:
    http://youtu.be/GuNVeDAQLww

    don't get me wrong, i loved laserium and other full dome laser shows. seeing dslijohn perform DSOTM at socalem a few years ago was an awesome trip down memory lane.

    people are fickle. art and culture changes. i don't know if there will ever be a emerging mass market for this kind of art form. i hope there is, but i'm doubtful. it was cool, it was innovating, and it was transporting. but... i think it will take a pretty profound cultural shift for this characteristics to be important again.

    imagination has been replaced by facebook and justin beiber.


    Quote Originally Posted by laserist View Post
    Laserium was always intended to be an Abstract show. The intro to Laserium I said, "...Laserium is a trip through your imagination, to where you've never been, and you're about to embark! (Fade up Master Intensity with Chopper full on - fade out Chopper to "explode" the "Burn" effect as synthesizer sweep reaches crescendo...) Laserium wasn't intended to be interpreted in a specific way, or communicate a specific message. So your explanation about its success being tied to specific time and social scene is more about your specific trip through your imagination. It was Ivan's intent to produce, "…an experience - its effect upon you depends upon what you bring to it. If you seek entertainment, or relaxation you may likely find it. If you seek inspiration or hidden significance you may find it also, but if you want explanations and explicit meanings they will not be there." Ivan really meant all of that. Laserium shows and performances were measured by Ivan on a spectrum where "a trip through your imagination" was at one end of the spectrum and self indulgent crap at the other end. I suppose self indulgent crap is at one end of everybody's spectrum. The trick is making sure that simply crap isn't at the other end.
    suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.

  8. #48
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    When I talk about Laserium I'm almost always talking about the early shows. I'm talking about the shows prior to 1983 that I had the chance to perform. These shows weren't perfect, but they were damn good, and I learned a bit about what works under a dome. You get to a point with anything where to do it any better requires tearing it apart to the point where you can go in another direction. I've looked at a number of other people's shows over the years, and IMO they never came close to that point. I never performed DSOTM, but I was in L.A. during the six months (more?) when Scott Anderson and Darryl Davis did the basic choreography for the Mark 6. It was an interesting, frantic, insane, and depressing time, and it was clear we were well into a death spiral and that Sam McGee was the last person who should be the pilot. Sam left 3 months after I quit. I've wondered what I would have done if he packed up first…

    I've seen any number of rationalizations about the success of Laserium and its downfall. The youth today are just different and this and that. That's why I brought back two of those early Laserium shows as an experiment. It turns out that people still like those old shows. Are they retro? Yes, by definition. Could they be done differently ever better today? Yes to that too. Sometimes I wonder if the explanations I read about why Laser Shows are damn near dead in Planetariums (btw a lot of planetariums haven't covered their costs since Laserium...) are more about explaining the general malaise of the Laser Show Industry. In other words the "world's moved on" talk isn't so much about yesterday's failure as it's an excuse for today's...
    Last edited by laserist; 04-25-2014 at 06:15.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  9. #49
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    So the answer is...??

    I guess that's a part of what the thread is all about. There is a segment of the population that will always have an interest in science and art but, I still see a shift in todays youth away from that. I don't know if it's laziness, technology over-saturation or what but, on the whole, I think there are less and less kids that have a clue what a chemistry set, erector set, or a 40 in 1 electronics kit from Radio Shack even is. Kinects became the new Lego for a while but, I don't know if it still is. I was blown away a couple nights ago when my 22 year old son (who is admittedly too lazy to go make something to eat in the kitchen if he's hungry) who was a computer science major, got a new laptop with Windows 8 installed. He hates it and asked if I had a copy of Windows 7. He tried to install it and when it wouldn't work, I suggested he go into the bios and make the DVD drive the first in the boot order and try booting from the DVD, reformat and install from scratch and he determined that was too hard and too much work. (He's got a "little" interest in lasers and would like to learn to program in LSX. Andrew GAVE him a copy at SELEM but we've had installation issues and haven't been able to get in touch with Andrew to get them resolved - but that's a different story.) Point being that, there is no "real" interest in lasers and he's around them frequently. Nor an interest in taking something apart to explore how it works. And it's not just him. I see it with my younger employees and others. They're good for watching beams for a bit and that's about it. So, maybe I'm subscribing to the "worlds moved on" as an excuse theory.

    I think our job, as I've said before, is the need to (re)educate what a laser show is... a good one. I just don't know what the best way to accomplish that is. As far as planetariums... who even knows. A domed IMAX theater may be the better avenue.

  10. #50
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    I truly belive it is over saturation. Yes, there are still people out there that appreciate the art of lasers, even the younger generations but that still doesn't mean that the over saturation hasn't already done its dirty work. Take photography, for instance. It used to be, you needed a good camera, a decent catalog of lenses, a nice tripod, a smattering of film canisters, knowledge of photography and a lot of patience. The cameras were expensive, the lenses were expensive, the tripods were expensive, and the film wasn't cheap to process (if you wanted it done right, you'd process it yourself). Everyone has a camera now. Everyone "can" use photoshop. We can now take 1000 pictures and choose the best one out of the batch. Thing is, it is still an art form but most people don't care about it anymore because of its "ease" of use. The actual art of taking a photograph is mostly gone (generally speaking).

    I grew up going to Laserium shows. It's what got me interested in lasers in the first place. The rest of the world, though, has moved on. The purity of color is no longer dazzling since the emergence of LED lighting, which is EVERYWHERE. "3D" theaters immerse people in the action. People have seen "laser shows" at every event from raves to supermarket grand openings. So many other distractions, as well. The pull of Laserium was that no one had ever seen anything like that before. Not just Laserium, but the medium in general. Much like photography, people can still be wowed by it but since the majority have been bombarded with it, most have moved on. The artist plays a huge part, as does marketing but you need to have an intriguing medium to create the art and I think that the loss of interest in the medium is what is killing it.
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