COSMOS: A personal voyage by Jon Lomberg - Jon Lomberg

COSMOS

A personal voyage by Jon Lomberg.

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Carl Sagan and I had begun thinking about COSMOS years before we made it. We had been working together on books and other projects since 1972, when I illustrated his early book The Cosmic Connection. We had developed a Gilbert and Sullivan like collaboration — he supplied the science and interpretation, I supplied the artwork. Our collaboration lasted until his death in 1996, when we were working together on the film of his novel Contact. I designed that movie’s opening animation sequence, moving from Earth to the edge of the Universe, in a digital reinterpretation of the entirely analog opening animation of COSMOS.

Fig.1 Carl Sagan. ©Jon Lomberg
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

Carl was not only my collaborator, he was also my close personal friend. We laughed and had fun as much as we worked. And I still dream about him and miss him often. Planet Earth certainly needs his wisdom now. But I am happy that his work remains popular and influential to this day all around the world.

By the time we actually started COSMOS in 1978, we had already spent years developing the ways that difficult concepts in physics, astronomy, and biology could be presented to the general public. I was prepared when he asked me to come to Los Angeles and supervise the artistic aspects of the production. This ended up involving not only astronomy, but biology, biochemistry, geology, and even history.

Fig.2 The author with Special Effects producer George Andorfer, painting acetate cels, and pointing to some of the models his team made. ©Jon Lomberg
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

That began two exciting and often difficult years learning about the worlds of Hollywood animation and special effects. I formed and led a team of artists that created the many images we would require. Some of my fondest memories are of working with my fellow artists Don Davis and Rick Sternbach, as well as astronomer Donald Goldsmith, with whom I formed lasting friendships. I’ll never forget the night Don Goldsmith and I stood on chairs and used two Frisbees to figure out the orientation of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies!

Fig.3 COSMOS artists Adolf Schaller, Don Davis, and Susan Brown in the COSMOS art room. ©Jon Lomberg
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

I worked with Carl every day during the first phase of the production, when we were planning all the programs, storyboarding the animation sequences and trying to visualize the series. One problem was how Carl’s “Spaceship of the Imagination” should look. Star Wars had been a big hit in 1977 and in 1979 the sequel The Empire Strikes Back was released. (Note the X-wing fighter on the photo on the art room wall.) Our budget was much smaller than George Lucas’s and I knew we could not compete with his spaceship models. And Carl did not want a realistic spaceship either, but something more abstract. When he saw my painting Starseeds, he decided that was the look he wanted. His spaceship would be like a seed drifting through the Cosmos. That is the origin of the symbolic dandelion that appears throughout the series.

Fig.4 Starseeds. ©Jon Lomberg  
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

Jon Lomberg (web)

Similarly, my painting The Backbone of Night became the title of a COSMOS Episode 8. Combining biological and astronomical motifs, was a perfect visual expression of Sagan’s view of the Universe, that we were deeply connected with the Cosmos. When we looked at the stars, we were looking at ourselves.

Fig.5 Backbone of Night. ©Jon Lomberg
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

Jon Lomberg (web)

Once we were in production, I did not see as much of Carl. He was traveling the world to film all the sequences in Japan, Europe, etc. Meanwhile, the artists stayed in Hollywood creating the Universe. This put a great deal of responsibility on me to make many decisions without Carl’s guidance. Not only did the animation have to be beautiful, it had to be accurate in many fields of science where new discoveries were being made daily, from DNA to galaxies. But he trusted me to do it properly and was pleased with the results.

Fig.6 DNA storyboards by Jon Lomberg and Frank Armitage. © Jon Lomberg

Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

Because the Voyager mission featured prominently in the series, working on COSMOS allowed me to come into even closer contact with the scientists and engineers. Since I was the design Director for the Golden Record the spacecraft carry, I already felt part of the mission. But working at JPL with Mission Planning Director Charley Kohlhase and others gave me special insight into this amazing project. During the Voyager 1 Jupiter encounter in 1979, we were in production of the episodes about the outer planets. COSMOS artists were painting models of planets and moons as fast as Voyager was viewing them, driving at high speed from JPL back to the COSMOS art studio with the latest photos in our hands. There was no Internet then, and we were among the first to see these new worlds and to create models based on the latest results.

Fig.7 Carl Sagan. ©Jon Lomberg
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

COSMOS also allowed me to meet and work with the JPL computer graphics pioneer Jim Blinn. He was inventing for COSMOS techniques of 3 dimensional modeling that grew into the entire world of cgi. He developed the morphing technique used in the animation of human evolution. Each line drawing was divided into the same number of line segments and the computer transformed each line segment into the next. It looks simple now but was revolutionary at the time and was the basis of all the morphing imagery that followed.

Fig.8 COSMOS evolution drawings by Susan Brown and Jon Lomberg.
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

That sequence also brought me into close contact with the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who laughed when I asked him for the sequence of organisms from the first cells to humans. ”We would all like to know that!” he said. But he supplied COSMOS artist Susan Brown with the references from which she drew all the animals in the required format. Jim Blinn’s team animated them in what remains one of the best sequences from the series, substantially enhanced by the brilliant choice of music. We all knew that music would be a very important part of the programs, and all the artists had music to suggest. Carl also had strong ideas of his own musically and picked Vangelis’s music for the theme.

Fig.9 COSMOS evolution drawings by Susan Brown and Jon Lomberg.
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

COSMOS was also the last major science program to use the traditional techniques of cell animation, plaster models, and use of real smoke, fog, etc. As a result of the development of computer graphics, these techniques quickly became obsolete and were replaced by cgi. Today when I speak to animators, I feel like an officer on one of the last sailing ships talking to modern marine engineers. Nobody will ever animate the way we did in COSMOS again.

Fig.10 COSMOS Executive Producer Adrian Malone with wax Titan model and background art.
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

We built planetary surfaces out of painted plaster and wax and large painted backgrounds. The Milky Way shown below is actually many separate acetate cels (I still have them). I had to slice the galaxy into sections, from back to front and paint each section on a separate cel. Each acetate cel was then lit and shot by itself, composited in the camera in with all the others. Increasing the distance of each sheet from the camera created a composite 3D effect. This is called multi-plane animation and was first developed by Walt Disney for Snow White in 1937.

Fig.11 Approaching the Milky Way. ©Jon Lomberg 
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.
Jon Lomberg (web)

COSMOS established the way the Universe looked for an entire generation. In the days before adaptive optics, before the Hubble Space Telescope, and before Voyager had visited the outer planets, artwork was the only we to get sharp, colorful images of the stars, moons, and planets, and COSMOS takes partial blame (or credit) for the very colorful style now used everywhere when depicting the rather pale and delicate colors of real space. Sometimes people are even disappointed when they see how nebulae and galaxies really look through a good telescope. I apologize for that!

Fig.12 Jon Lomberg was Chief Artist for COSMOS and won an Emmy Award for this work in 1981. He was Design Director for the Voyager Golden Record and has also designed artwork message now on Mars aboard NASA rovers. He lives in Hawaii and his work can be seen at www.jonlomberg.com
Crédito: imagen cedida por el autor del texto Jon Lomberg.

More importantly COSMOS seems to have inspired a generation people to enter the sciences and participate in the scientific adventures my friend Carl Sagan so wonderfully described. In the four decades since we made the program, I have met hundreds of people who have thanked me for the way the series influenced their own life and career choices and interest in science. In a media-saturated world where we forget about yesterday’s programs so quickly, it is incredible how much impact that one series has had. Of course I am proud, and on behalf of Sagan and all the others who worked on the programs, I thank all of you who have made us feel we contributed something important to the world.

Jon Lomberg.

Chief Artist for COSMOS.

Design Director for the Voyager Golden Record.