Week 12: Matej & Thanassis

Matej

Last Friday, thanks to a generous contribution of SciArt, I was able to visit Thanassis at the TRIUMF research facility in Vancouver. This step was a critical part of our collaboration. I recorded a lot of film material inside the DRAGON facility and the collider hall. Predominantly still video scenes. The most exciting part was being able to take a ride in a crane which offered nice rolling shots of the whole facility form a birds-eye perspective. I had the opportunity to examine all the research equipment carefully and think about how to bring the concepts of what they represent both, physically and philosophically together in our science fiction movie. By the way, we keep calling it a movie, but it will be rather almost three dimensional a spatial experiment because it will be projected in 360 degrees inside planetarium dome. 

I am glad that I had the opportunity to meet the whole Dragon team led by Chris Ruiz. Everyone was very open and helped to facilitate the entire visit and movie shoot. On Chris's suggestion right now we are in negotiation with the Vancouver Planetarium about using their 360 dome camera. If this would work out, we could do a hi-res 360 scan of the whole facility. That will be a fantastic addition to the movie. Fingers crossed. 

An equally essential parts of my visit were our lengthy discussions with researcher Devin Connolly about nature of the data collected at the DRAGON facility and possibilities for its visualization. After December 15th we are starting working on that. 

At the time of my visit to TRIUMF, together with Thanassis, we were able to take over SciArt's Instagram. Below I am sharing a few photographs of the visit. We were also interviewed TRIUMF media center. The interview should be published soon. 
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I would like to thank everyone at TRIUMF for a great deal of hospitality and feeding my curiosity about particle physics: Thanassis, Chris, Devin and Ashwini

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Thanassis

Hello world! I came back to Hamilton from Vancouver last Wednesday. The trip was A M A Z I N G! I learned a lot during the experiments and the most important is that we made a huge step in our project with Matej. We didn’t have as much time as we really wanted, but we managed to get many things done during three very busy days. Matej took footage from the lab from every possible way - even from a crane ~ 7m tall! - and had lots of discussions with local scientists who were very excited about our project. I think he enjoyed the lab and the people there and I am very happy that I was part of this experience.

Matej and I in our last day together in the lab.

The “raw material” for our sci-fi movie is almost ready and now we need to get my experimental data into the game around mid December, when Matej will be done with his academic obligations. We will also start working on the 3D animations and the footage we got from the lab then. We expect the movie to be  ~20 minutes long and we plan to have our “world premiere” at McCallion Planetarium, here in Hamilton, this April.

Something we are really excited about is that we might have a chance to get lab footage from a 360 camera! We have made some initial conversations with a Planetarium in Vancouver, which can borrow it to us. It’s not final yet, but it would be awesome if we can get it.

See you next week! :)
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