Dark – The Movie
Produced by Peter Morse and Paul Bourke
DARK is a fulldome movie that explains and explores the nature of Dark Matter, the missing 80% of the mass of the Universe.
The Story
The search for Dark Matter is one of the most pressing astrophysical problems of our time – the solution to which will help us understand why the Universe is as it is, where it came from, and how it has evolved over billions of years – the unimaginable depths of deep time, of which a human life is but a flickering instant.
But in that instant, we can grasp its immensity and, through science, we can attempt to understand it.
The movie is presented by Professor Alan Duffy, a brilliant young astronomer who creates simulations of Dark Matter evolution inside supercomputers. Alan introduces us to the idea of Dark Matter, why astronomers think it exists, and explains why Radio Astronomy is so well-suited to its discovery.
We explore why the new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) Telescope, located in remote Western Australia, is so important in this scientific quest.
But this is only the beginning.
We journey through completely immersive visualisations of Dark Matter evolution calculated upon some of the world’s fastest supercomputers – cosmological visions on a truly vast scale, in which galaxies themselves are but points of light, distributed across far larger intergalactic structures of Dark Matter. These visualisations, developed by Paul Bourke, demonstrate the cutting-edge of contemporary supercomputer visualisation of massive scientific datasets and astrophysical simulation.
It sounds like Science Fiction, but it’s not. It’s the real stuff. Real Data, seen in this way for the first time.
Directed by Peter Morse, DARK is an adventure to the very edges of contemporary cosmology and data visualisation, telling a complex scientific story in an accessible way.
We hope you enjoy DARK
Distribution
Dark has been exhibited world-wide in over 10 languages in dozens of planetaria and science centres, for listings see: Exhibitions.
4k Dome Masters and 5.1 Audio are available for download from the European Space Observatory: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/dark/
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Also available from ZEISS (Germany), Fulldome Film Society (Russia), RSA Cosmos (France), Altair LLC (Japan).
FDDB: http://www.fddb.org/fulldome-shows/dark/
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5177612/
Marketing Materials
Dark A4 Flyer (print) – Dark A4 Flyer (web) – Dark Poster (CMYK pdf) – Dark Poster (jpg)
International Translations
Scripts: English – Hindi – Italian – Japanese – Telugu
International Voice Over sound tracks are available from:
http://paulbourke.net/dome/Dark/
Production Credits
Directed by Peter Morse
Produced by Peter Morse & Paul Bourke
Presented by Alan Duffy
Written by Alan Duffy & Peter Morse
Dark Matter Simulations: Alan Duffy and Robert Crain
Dark Matter Visualisation: Paul Bourke & Peter Morse
Digital Sky Milky Way Animation: Carley Tillett
Editing, 3D Modelling, Compositing & Special Effects, Colour Grade, 4k Dome Master: Peter Morse
Music: Cathie Travers
Audio: Peter Morse & Trevor Hilton
Lighting: Peter Morse & Ákos Brúz
Fulldome Timelapse: Peter Morse & Chris Henderson
Parkes Panorama: Alex Cherney
Galaxy Animation: Paul Bourke
LadyBug-3 Video: Paul Bourke & Peter Morse
Compute & Network Support: Jason Tan, Ashley Chew, Khanh Ly (iVEC@UWA)
Galaxy Images courtesy Hubble, STScI, NASA
Milky Way image courtesy ESO/S.Brunier.
Special thanks to:
Carley Tillett and Horizon – The Planetarium at Scitech
Paul Ricketts, Centre for Learning Technology, UWA
Thomas Braunl, UWA Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems, UWA
John Doyle, Octagon Theatre, UWA
Andreas Wicenec, ICRAR, UWA
Sally Hildred
Funding:
Dark was funded jointly by iVEC, Scitech and iVEC@UWA.