‘I briefly wondered whether I'd accidentally consumed shrooms': the psychedelia – and science – of full dome cinema
Since emerging in their present form in the 90s, full dome films have occupied a curious place in the cinema landscape. Exhibited at planetariums on a large curved display situated above the audience's heads, they offer a unique experience: more immersive than the traditional rectangular frame, though not as transportive as technologies like virtual reality.
Maintaining the social aspects of cinema, watching a full dome film is sort of like going to the movies, and sort of not.
If you've never experienced one, the Dome Under film festival is a good place to start. The 2025 program – which runs from 31 January to 2 February in Melbourne – contains 32 films from 15 countries, spanning documentaries to family animations to sci-fi productions that traverse the cosmos, throwing all sorts of trippy things at you.
One of my first full dome experiences was Pink Floyd's extravaganza for Dark Side of the Moon, a visual spectacle so wildly psychedelic I briefly wondered whether I had accidentally consumed magic mushrooms.
For Dome Under's festival director, Warik Lawrance, that formative experience was The Search for Life: Are We Alone, an alien short narrated by Harrison Ford. 'This is amazing, it's just so cool,' Lawrance recalls thinking when he watched it in 2005. 'I want to work in this medium!'
Lawrance has subsequently programmed countless titles that have screened at Melbourne's Scienceworks. He says children 'delight in the medium' while adults 'are usually in quiet amazement, looking at how vast the imagery above them is, and moving around to take it all in'.
This year's opening night film is Dark Biosphere, a Viggo Mortensen-narrated doco about micro-organisms that exist below the Earth's crust, without light or air. After a few picturesque introductory shots of rivers and mountains, the camera plunges into the water. At one point, we zoom out, and out, and out some more, all the way into space, revealing the Earth from a distance. I felt like I was leaving my seat and lifting into the heavens.
A full dome experience, says Lawrence, 'works particularly well when it's taking you to a new environment, perhaps one you couldn't possibly visit. The bottom of the ocean – or inside the human body – are great examples of that … The best question is not 'where am I putting something on the screen?' but 'where can I transport my audience to?''
Journeying across the universe is a common motif in this year's program. The handsomely animated kids production The Great Solar System Adventure lives up to its title; Stars of Classic matches visions of outer spacer with music from the likes of Beethoven and Vivaldi. In I Saw the Future, a huge floating head enunciates the technological predictions of the great author and futurist Arthur C Clarke.
It makes sense that scenes based in space look terrific in this format. After all, we are in a planetarium, where the ancient tradition of stargazing has been given a digital makeover, virtual skylines replacing real ones. But Lawrance says the reason space looks great is also about the kinds of light and colour being used.
'What works really, really well in planetariums are very dark scenes,' he says. 'Bright scenes light up the dome, and you're much more conscious of it being a screened surface. But when it's in space, and it's very black, you lose your sense completely of where the dome is.'
It's so enveloping that you might lose sight of your senses completely. 'I've had people who've come out of the planetarium and said to me, 'That was the most incredible 3D I've ever seen.',' Lawrance says. 'That's amazing, because it's not actually 3D at all.'
Dome Under film festival runs 31 January to 2 February at Melbourne Planetarium, Scienceworks
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