‘I briefly wondered whether I’d accidentally consumed shrooms’: the psychedelia – and science – of full dome cinema | Movies

SSince their emergence in their current form in the 1990s, full-dome films have occupied a strange place in the cinematic landscape. Projected in planetariums on a large, curved screen located above the audience’s heads, they offer a unique experience: more immersive than a traditional rectangular frame, although not as impactful as technologies such as virtual reality.

Maintaining the social aspects of cinema, watching a full movie is like going to the cinema, but it is not.

If you’ve never tried one,… Dome Under Cinema Festival A good place to start. The 2025 program – which runs from January 31 to February 2 in Melbourne – contains 32 films from 15 countries, from documentaries to family animation to sci-fi productions that traverse the universe, throwing all sorts of exciting things at you.

One of my first Full Dome experiences was Pink Floyd’s extravaganza of Dark Side of the Moon, a visual spectacle so dramatic that I briefly wondered if I’d accidentally consumed magic mushrooms.

For Dome Under Festival Director, Eric Lawrence, that formative experience was Searching for Life: Are We Alone, a short film about an alien narrated by Harrison Ford. Lawrence remembers thinking when he saw it in 2005: “This is amazing, this is absolutely amazing. I want to work in this medium!”

Lawrence subsequently programmed a myriad of titles which were showcased at Scienceworks in Melbourne. Children, he says, “enjoy the medium” while adults “are usually in a state of quiet amazement, looking at how vast the images are above them, moving to take it all in.”

This year’s opening night film is Dark Biosphere, a documentary narrated by Viggo Mortensen about microorganisms that exist beneath the Earth’s crust, without light or air. After a few picturesque introductory shots of rivers and mountains, the camera dips into the water. At some point, we zoom out and zoom out and zoom out some more, all the way into space, exposing Earth from a great distance. I felt like I was leaving my seat and ascending to heaven.

The full dome experience, Lawrence says, “works especially well when it takes you into a new environment that you might not otherwise be able to visit. The bottom of the ocean — or the inside of a human body — are great examples of this… The better question isn’t, ‘Where do I put something on the screen?'” Lawrence says. ?” but “Where can I take my audience?”

Journey through the universe is a popular theme in this year’s programme. This wonderful children’s animated production The Great Solar System Adventure lives up to its title; Stars of Classic matches visions of the outer spacer with music from the likes of Beethoven and Vivaldi. In the novel I Saw the Future, a huge floating head announces the technological predictions of the great author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke.

It makes sense that scenes set in space would look great in this format. After all, we are We are In the planetarium, the ancient tradition of stargazing has been given a digital makeover, with virtual horizon lines replacing the real ones. But Lawrence says the reason a space looks great is also the types of light and colors used.

“What really, really works “In planetariums there are very dark scenes,” he says. “Bright scenes illuminate the dome, and you become more aware that it is an obscured surface. But when you are in space, and it is very dark, you completely lose the sense of where the dome is.”

It’s so enveloping that you may completely lose your senses. “I’ve had people come out of the planetarium and say, ‘That was the most amazing 3-D movie I’ve ever seen,'” Lawrence says. “This is amazing, because it’s actually not 3D at all.”