“You are trying to produce these rather extraordinarily advanced productions, but with a far smaller budget and far fewer people than in a commercial venture like the movies,” Krupp says.

Workers dug a trench to bring in additional electricity to the building. Planetarium screen specialists Astro-Tec manufactured the studio’s mini-dome, which is used for daily footage review, and software developer Autodesk joined the project as a technology partner, donating access to its 3D, production and rendering programs. Next door to the Satellite studio, the team created a heavily air-conditioned room housing 130 hard drives, or “blades,” including a continually updated backup set of drives, which is kept on a wheeled cart for quick evacuation in the event of a fire, flood or other emergency. The farm’s blades work around the clock, as do any idle studio workstations, and while a dedicated “render wrangler,” Oneal Douglin, oversees this churn during regular hours, Fidrick will remotely log in from home in the middle of the night, to ensure against glitches.

This past summer, two more SVA alumni joined Fidrick and Smith in the Griffith studio. Sean Golding (BFA 2010 Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) and Carl Vasquez (BFA 2009 Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects), both brought on as CGI generalists, will help fast-track production as the project enters its final stages.

When Signs of Life goes live, each performance will be narrated by one of the observatory’s staff presenters. This is increasingly rare for planetarium shows, which typically employ recorded narration, and requires an unusual combination of filmmaking and staging techniques. In this way, Signs of Life is both a professional homecoming and synthesis for Fidrick, who among other theater jobs worked as stage manager for The Blue Man Group in New York City before enrolling at SVA.

“Doing VFX for films, so often I felt like a cog in a wheel,” she says. “I missed the excitement and the collaboration of theater. Being able to combine what I’ve learned in both fields, being able to help build a nurturing environment where people from all backgrounds can make a creative contribution, and to do all of this in the service of a truly public-minded project . . . I can’t imagine anything better.”

Alexander Gelfand has written for The Economist, The New York Times and Wired, among other publications.

A version of this interview appears in the fall/winter 2019 Visual Arts Journal.

Features

The multimedia production, many years in the making, premieres Friday, May 20, at the observatory’s Samuel Oschin Planetarium.