I'm t T and I'm Zakiah, and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. Well, y'all, we made a planetarium film. It feels wild to even say it now. It really does, because I mean it all started like four years ago and we have been working on it for that long. Yeah, I have a new respect for people who are filmmakers. Like, I knew it was hard, but this was, like, creatively one of
the hardest things I've ever done. Zakia, your brain is different from mine, so I was just like trying to envision everything and it. It just took so much. But it was a labor of love, it really was. And TT saying, oh, my brain is different. Don't y'all fall for that? Okay. Halfway through the project, t T gave me one of those, you know, work style tests and was like, I'm this kind of worker. What kind of worker are you? She was saying, she was fed up.
That was her work. I want everybody to know I was just trying to help folks understand themselves more so that you can, you know, say these are my strengths, these are our weaknesses. How can we blend together? But honestly, in this creative process, I really felt like me and the kid complement each other very well, you know. But
let's talk about the film a little bit. So it's called Remixed The Unexpected Side of Science, And in this film, we're showing young folks that the things that they're interested in currently, like right now, are all rooted in science. So it feels like a Dope Labs episode, but the scope is just way bigger and it's not just audio, it's visual too, which was a lot of fun. Now.
The film premiered November sixth at the Museum of Science in Boston, and so we had a really great event at the museum because we already were expanding in to the visual space for Dope Labs, and then we were able to take dopelops and then we were able to take Dope Labs into the live event space.
Right.
So we had a painting experience because we talk about science and art. We had an ice cream station with liquid nitrogen because we talked about science and food, and we had a podcast studio for folks to flex their science communication muscles a little bit. And tell us what they thought about the film. Let's listen to that right now.
Actually, I gotta tell you, my favorite part was learning just all the different science between algorithms in music, how different ways that those songs get put together or put using science, using large mathematical models. That just blows my mind that something as simple as music these days can be so complicated and so science space. That's exactly why we need to understand this more, because it's not gonna just make our music better, it's gonna make our jams better.
That was my favorite part.
I thought this film was brilliant and fun and soative, But I think my favorite part and the part where I teared up, was at the end where they were encouraging kids and people everywhere to use the voice that they have, to share their ideas and get their feetvd into the world and connect that to science. Because they
it wasn't just empty words. They had kind of shown you all the way through through pictures and words and music and sounds, so that you were carried along in that experience and felt you just too.
Do you guys want to say anything?
My favorite part was when they showed how sports was like intertwined with science.
So my favorite part of the movie honestly was seeing more black women at science, because you don't really see a lot of dope black women that are you know, cool and hips doing science, and just to think about how we do that in our everyday life is so funny to me because now I'm going to be at work like, oh, I'm a scientist, like ice scoop ice cream and I managed, so I'm a scientist. I'm making a milkshake, so I'm a scientist. So it was really fun to see how like we can incorporate science into
our everyday lives. I don't really think anything really surprised me, but I guess it was more a sounding that we do use science every single day within our lives. So it was really cool to see everybody you know, participating in their own way, whether it be sports or art. So it was just really cool to be a part of that experience.
One of our major goals with this film is that we wanted to help bridge the gap and try to get rid of the narrative that being interested in science and like stem careers means that you will be wearing a lab coat and working with beakers and in some cold, dark, stuffy lab all day like science is everywhere, and so that's really what we wanted to highlight with this film was that you know, you could be interested in music, and there's lots of science there that you could be
interested in. In food, there's a ton of chemistry there, and you can be interested in sports, and of course there's a lot of physics and material science and biomechanics and so so much more. And so that's really what we wanted to show. And so at the actual event at the premiere, we ask people how they were a scientist in their own day to day lives. So didn't have to be a scientist, but show us tell us a little bit about how you use science in your
day to day. I am a scientist in my every day lit because I love learning and I feel like science is about the pursuit of knowledge, and so every day I.
Try to learn something new and figure out something that I don't know about the world around me, and make new observations that inform inform the world for me.
So I thoroughly enjoy the film a lot. And one of the questions is share how you are a scientists in your day to day and I am a manager Jerry's and we scooped by ounces and like different combinations of ice creams, the mixtures, and I feel like that also has a bit of science in it as well.
And what was my favorite part was definitely the animation and how easy it was to really articulate how science is in everyday life, especially with like, you know, movement, riding a bike, even just as basic as like not basic, because heart is not basic at all.
It's very hard, but.
Just doing every day to day life was really amazing, and that was one of my favorite parts of how science really incorporates I think former science major. It really did bring like a nice like warmth to my heart to see it again and letting everybody even to like everybody that could be part of it. And it's just not like stay in a lab and being a nerd. It's literally every day life.
So I really could enjoy that.
I really loved that because since they had already seen the film when they started doing these recordings, it really showed that it helped them see themselves as scientists in their day to day I mean that one woman who was talking about how she works in an ice cream shop and so she sees how they're weighing things out and you know, ounces and things like that. I was like, exactly, like,
this is exactly what we wanted. So it felt so good to hear those and know that the impact we were hoping to have with the film it was realized just then. That's before it gets out exactly the broader public. You know, when we think about how this type of opportunity comes to fruition, I think a lot of it comes from finding our people, like minded folks who understand, you know, the dope lbs ethos of science and bringing science to folks. And I think this really goes back
to when we first started releasing episodes. The Museum's creative director, James Monroe emailed us and said, hey, do you want to do a live show now? I think that was
our first live show. Yes, it was with the Museum of Science, and it was so fun and things just grew from there, you know, from live shows to shows inside the planetarium, to hosting and doing other events, and then we just realized like when there was a call for this type of project, it felt natural because we had been working together with the museum, both Subspace and the Planetarium for a while and it felt like a
natural blend. So for this episode, we really wanted to make sure that we brought in one of our main collaborators at the Museum of Science, Danny LeBlanc. She is the head of the planetarium and she's going to be talking with us about Remixed.
Hi am Danny.
I used to see her pronouns, and I am our director for Immersive theaters at the Museum of Science as well as the director for the Center for Space Sciences at the Museum of Science in Boston.
The Museum of Science is a cultural institution in the Northeast. Whenever I talk to somebody who and I talk to a lot of people who have gone through Boston. You know when the life sciences you have MIT, Harvard, all the big schools. There a lot of great tech and innovation there. But people are like, have you seen the lightning exhibit at the Museum of Science? Have you? You know, they always somebody always tells me about their favorite exhibit
and how in childhood they went to the museum. The museum has been there a long time, right, It's been there for a long time.
We'll be celebrating two hundred years in twenty thirty.
That's right behind the Quaker Oaks. The United States is just now celebrating this two hundred and fiftieth anniversary next year, so that's early stage. We have been working with the museum for a few years now. We've been doing live shows and before this film, the most recent thing is that we did a planetarium live show, which was very,
very special and very cool to do. Can you talk about planetariums just in general, like across the country, like how planetariums impact the museum space and why they're so special. We know, but we want the people to know.
Yeah, thank you, so yeah, the iconic experiences of the museum. I always think, like what we hear a lot of is there's the lightning show in the theater electricity, there's the Mugar Omni theater. The planetarium has been at our institution since nineteen fifty eight. Planetariums actually have been around
for one hundred years. They just celebrated a centennial last year. Traditionally, a planetarium is a place where, you know, and one hundred years ago, you'd walk in and you'd sit back in a seat, look up and there would be a projector in the middle with a light source inside and little pinpoint holes that would be very very precisely arranged so that it would make it look like you're projecting the night sky, and it would just transport you to
another world and just get the imagination started and just it invites curiosity and wonder. Technology has changed since then, so now were able to transport people using different technology. When I started in two thousand, so I've been there for twenty five years, so not the two hundred years.
Of the institution, but it feels like a substantial amount of time.
When I started there, we were using slide projectors, which is like still very like old school technology, but the team there was already producing content that would with slides just create still images and like panoramas and like put you in a rainforest, or put you in these still images and these still environments where you can look around at three hundred and sixty degrees and see something cool. Throughout the two thousands, video technology is getting better and better.
Into twenty ten, it was for us we went to what's called digital full dome technology, and so now instead of using slide projectors, we were able to use video to create pretty much anything that we can like dream up or imagine and create that on the screen so that we can tell these incredible immersive stories that people can come in, sit down, look up, and follow this journey.
And I think that has just allowed so much.
And I think in this case, with the two of you at the Helm, we were able to take.
The things that were in your minds and the things that you.
Do in the podcast so beautifully and be able to support it now with all of these other elements visuals and audio, sound and music and just fun and joy.
I think you got to know to really appreciate what you and the team at the Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science are doing, you have to really know what the baseline is. And so let's talk about what the baseline experience these days if you go to a planetarium, because a lot of our audience I'm curious, I'm like, how many people have been to a planetarium
in the last ten years? Comment and let us know on whatever platform you're listening to this on and what is the experience for those who haven't been in the last ten years? Typically, what does it look like to see an astronomy story in the planetarium. Danny with Digital Full dome technology.
There's a lot of different experiences that you can have, but typically you walk in and I should say every planetarium around the world is different and unique in some way.
There's all different, like the domes are.
They look different, they're different sizes, they're different angles. The seating configurations are different for us. You walk in, you go up a little ramp and then you get to choose your seat. The seats are all arranged in a circle. It's called concentric seating. But it's got this really cool storytelling campfire.
Field that we love.
Right, So everybody's seated in a circle.
It's very community style.
You sit back and you look up and then a show begins. You know, we could have something about black holes, or there could be something about we have a show that's about exoplanets, which is all the worlds that are being discovered outside of our own solar system.
And you'll have a narrator.
Usually it's a single narrator, the voice of the universe who's telling you this story. But it's a very passive kind of experience that you just sit take it all in.
It's beautiful spectacle.
The imagery transports you, takes you to these other worlds, but you don't really get a chance to engage back.
So that's like the traditional typical show.
We have other shows in digital full dome technology now that allow you to actually fly through the universe is what we call it, So you can actually someone can drive behind the console and real time they're flying you around, lifting off the Earth, looking at planets, looking at the moons, going beyond the Solar System, looking at the galaxy star
clusters and then galaxies beyond. But what's really cool about that now in twenty first century is that it's all based on real research and real astronomical catalogs from scientists that are put into these data sets that we get to access in real time and fly through. So you think of like Google Earth you get to explore on
your computer. This is like Google Universe with a tour guide and you can ask questions and you know, we can have a lot of fun with that, and we can tailor it for the audience so that it's different for us as presenters every time too.
Can you talk about your team a little bit, who they are, what their roles are, and how they contribute to this amazing work because they have very unique sets of skills that you don't find very many places.
Yeah, there's no school for learning how to do what we do. So I'm incredibly lucky. I have a pretty sizeable team. They're educators, VFX, multimedia producers, and artists, and we all wear many hats. On this particular team. We have people who are trained in astronomy who've gone to school for it, and we have people who've trained in completely different disciplines. Aren't a few people who we've had
in the past that have different science discipline trainings. But really what they're interested in and what brings everybody together is the idea of science communication and telling these stories.
And then even if.
They don't know astronomy or haven't learned it in a classroom, they're excited by it because they know that it can open up these bigger questions and they have themselves that curiosity.
So my team there's seven people.
We've got two of them who started before I did, one of.
Them who trained me. His name is Darryl.
He's been there for I think forty years so, and he worked in planetariums even before the one that we're at now. He's been working in planetariums since he was sixteen and so, and this is very common in our field. There's people who just stay here doing this for a long time because they just get so much joy from it. And then we have another staff person, one of our VFX multimedia artists.
His name is Chuck.
His parents worked in the planetarium in nineteen fifty eight, both of them, so he's been at the museum for a long time. And then we have people who've been there for fifteen years and in that order of magnitude. And we have people who just started the last couple of years who are new and just like learning the field. And both of them came with video production and animation backgrounds.
Not all planetariums are producing films. You're both displaying films, but you're also producing new content that then gets picked up by other planetariums. Right, so you both are a knowledge distributor and a knowledge producer with your team, and I think that's really important to credit. I think in the past you've told me before, in the past fifteen years, you all have created six shows. Now, the one with Dope Labs we're very excited about, and we're going to
talk about that in a little bit. But I want to talk about what it looks like to collaborate because we've been collaborators for years and I think people think about collaboration in different ways, and this is the wildest group project I've been a part of. I think our collaboration has been so special and it didn't feel foreign to us because TT and I have worked in labs and this felt just like that, like working with your team felt like, Okay, the Dope Labs lab is now
working with the Planetarium Lab. They're grass students their PI, like we're working all together. And it was such a great process.
I loved working with both of you and want to talk about that because it was the creating something out of nothing or with a seed, the seed of Dope Labs, and like, how does that manifest into something that's like this visual experience and that ability to be able to iterate, Like I love, I just want to I'm stuck on what you said because it's so great, Like it was a lab and we get to iterate and try some things, see what they look like, tweak, adjust, and then try again,
and that was just that whole process was so so much fun and it really was the first time that we did it like that in such an organic way because usually so talking about some of the other collaborations that we've had, we do we start from scripts, we start from like it's a very linear there's still room for creativity and for freedom and for trying things and for iterating, but it's more along this like linear path.
We know the story we want to tell and we kind of just start to write it and then we
map it out. This we decided to go to Oklahoma in the last six weeks of production, and then two weeks later we're in Oklahoma and our cinematographer is like in a field with sticks that I didn't know what those were, right, And like, I just I loved the process, collaboration and being able to figure it out on the fly, and just for us, it was really important that we were following your vision the whole time, and that so if you any ideas that you had bucking Broncos, sure,
let's let's let's go for it, because that's never been done before and it tells the story and it's going to surprise people in a way that is going to engage them and get their attention, and that is what we're hoping for.
I always go back to the moment where this was presented to us as a possibility when we were applying for the grant from NASA, and I was just so blown away that we were even thought of for something like this. This was just not on my bingo card when it came to like Dope Labs and building the Dope Labs ecosystem. I never in a million years what I thought I would be co producing a film with Zakia.
But I'm curious how you approach it and like what made you say this would be a great project for TT and Zakiya.
Well, for that part, we had been following you.
I know, we had been at events that you'd had at the museum before this project, and the two of you are just incredible science communicators and the energy that you have in the podcast and that just together and telling those stories to be able to like bring that into the planetary and we already knew that was going to be something magical because it's so different from that single voice, right to have the two of you engaging together and having fun together brings the audience into the
story in a way that just isn't hasn't really been done. I don't know why, and I'm hoping that this will start a trend and let's have other people try it more.
We went to Don'tfest with which is a planetarium and immersive film conference where people are showing what's new, what's next, what's happening in the field. And for anybody thinks that planetarium films are just like this niche only looking at astronomy. Only people who are super nerded out are into this. The United States Space Force has a planetarium film that is in the way. We have a navy and an army.
We have a group of not planeteers, I don't know what they're called, but that's Captain Planet in them, Captain Planet and all of his friends. We have a defense team that has been built and is monitoring space on behalf of the United States. So the United States Space
Force created a planetarium film. When we saw that film at Domefest West, I said, this looks very, very different from the things that I've seen before, and I want you to tell us, like, what do you see that was different the adoption of that type of technology, But your team has done now and how you see what's ahead for evolving filmmaking.
In the dome I think, yeah, I remember that film.
I also remember the one with the trees where it was like just the journey of a tree in the forest that becomes a violin.
Who would have thought.
That a story like that is going to be told on plane term. So I think that there's evolutions in the storytelling. There's evolutions, and I think this show is such a big part of that because there were so many things that we tried just from the storytelling angle, like having two narrators, having both of you on screen for part of it, doing so much live action filming as we did that is really really really new and novel for the field, and so I'm excited about that.
And then for the tech that's also getting better and better, like the video production technology, the cameras that are being used we did live action filming, as screens and projection technology get better in planetariums and now a lot of domes are thinking about there's a few that have already gone and many more that are coming online to go
to LED technology. And LED technology is going to like show every visual flaw right, So because it's there bright, it's many pixels, it's a lot of lumens and lot of light, and you see all the every artifact, so the technology has to catch up and keep up. But I think that being able to tell stories with live action is also something that's traditionally not been done in planetariums, but now the technology is catching up so that you
can tell stories about people, not just about space. Space is awesome, there's room for that too, but we can tell stories about the people, which just adds now so much humanity to the experience that you're getting inside the space.
And now it's like.
We can have Anie a Khon, which is one of our artists in the film, telling his story about how his process works and seeing his artwork come to life in front of us, like from his sketchbooks and from his murals.
We can bring that in a way that people weren't able to experience before.
So the tech will always, i think, be secondary and supportive to the story, but the tech definitely allows us to tell stories that we were never able to tell before. I just couldn't be happier with how it came out. I hope the two of you feel the same.
Absolutely, absolutely. This has been such a rewarding experience and seeing all of our ideas come to life has been amazing and We've really as always loved working with your team. So I guess what's next for this film is we're hoping to have it rolled out across the country to planetariums and museums anywhere where you can watch it. We want to have it in front of folks and have you all who are listening to this be able to
see it. If you're in the Boston area, you can see it right now, yes, at the Museum of Science. And if you're not in the Boston area and you have a local museum or planetarium, tell them you want to see it. It's digital, we can send it as always. Thank you so much, Danny. You've been so incredibly patient, so willing to explore with us and really appreciated our not for the faint of heart, process of ideation, storytelling ventures.
I wouldn't trade them for anything, and they were meant to be. Like the show is such a great compilation of all of these incredible ideas and it's a great experience.
Well, thank you so much for choosing us and making it happen. I think we also want to thank the folks who supported this, so the Simons Foundation and Science Sandbox there, NASA and the Charles Hayden Planetarium Foundation and the Museum of Science. So yes, I mean it takes a village that was our village to make this happen. So you may be wondering, how can I see this? If I want to see this, Well, if you are in the Boston area, please go to the Museum of Science.
Remix is being shown there and you can see it in a full dome space. But our really big hope and what we're pushing for is that next year, so in twenty twenty six, that this film will be rolled out to planetariums and science spaces across the country. And as that is happening, we will be letting all of you all know. So if it's coming to an area near you, make sure you're locked in with us on Instagram, on X and right here on the podcast. And if it's not coming to you, tell the people you want
Tell the people. Yeah, definitely tell the people. Tell the people you want to see Dope Labs. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. That's what my daddy always says. M He's not wrong, he is not wrong. You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast tt is on X and Instagram at dr Underscore, t s h O and you can find Zakiya at z said So. Dope Labs is a production of Lamanada Media. Our supervising producer is Keegan Zimma and our producer is Issara A. Sevez.
Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed by James Farber. Limanada Media is Vice President of Partnerships and Production is Jackie dan Siker. Executive producer from iHeart podcast is Katrina Norvil. Marketing lead is Alison Kanter. Original music composed and produced by Takayasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Wattley.