An invitation to the "Best of Earth" for all my subscribers
Yours truly is an official judge
I would like to personally invite you to the livestreamed event “Best of Earth” happening at Jena Planetarium on May 2nd at 11AM PST, of which I am one of five official judges.
First, a little background.
I haven’t really talked about my personal and professional life on this Substack, or on DailyKos where most of you have come from. I’ve been a 3D animator and content creator for about 15 years now and for the past 10 years I have been working in the fulldome industry and producing content.
“What is the fulldome industry” you may ask. Well let me enlighten you!
You are no doubt aware of the existence of planetariums around the world, which are dedicated to teaching people about the Universe and other science-based topics mostly revolving around astronomy. With the rise of digital projections most planetariums converted their old Zeiss star projectors to digital projection systems which greatly enhanced their ability to show content that wasn’t limited to just showing the night sky and pointing things out with a laser pointer.
Planetariums also showed laser light shows back in the day and the most popular were the Pink Floyd Laser Light shows which many of you no doubt attended.
I started becoming aware of domes as entertainment spaces when I was a DJ attending electronic music festivals and through my volunteer work with Shambhala Music Festival in British Columbia I was granted permission to create my own dome chill space for one of the main stages.
Through that effort I discovered the power of the circular format, a power that ancient and indigenous peoples around the world have known about for millennia. I could literally spend an entire blog describing the effect that these circular spaces have on human consciousness and the power they hold for creating healing experiences.
Over the years I toured festivals around Western Canada (including a festival that I helped create called Entheos Gathering) with a 36 foot diameter geodesic dome that I would set up and create healing and relaxation zones with live DJ’d chill music. We would hold powerful activations and guide people through psychedelic journeys and also help people through some of the traumas and difficulties that would inevitably come up through these journeys (and now that we seem to be experiencing a psychedelic revolution I feel safe speaking about this).
Eventually I moved to California and sold my dome since I didn’t want to bring it with me. However I continued to be drawn to creating dome experiences and I was part of a crew that created a 55 foot diameter dome experience at Burning Man in 2011. Through this effort I met a man named Ed Lantz who was one of the pioneers of the digital dome format and was running a dome company in LA called Vortex Immersion Media.
In 2013 I moved to LA to work for Vortex and that’s when I learned how to create content in the 360 degree immersive format. When done right, immersive content becomes a much more powerful medium for engagement and transformation because the content literally surrounds you and puts you inside of it rather than having you view it through a flat portal or “proscenium”.
Since Vortex was focused mainly on businesses and corporations I ended up creating dome experiences for companies who wanted to create unique promotional activations for their customers.
However we eventually realized that creating corporate activations wasn’t fulfilling so we began focusing on creating entertainment-based immersive content and our first production, James Hood’s “Mesmerica”, of which I was one of the animators, was a smashing success and played to sold out shows all over the country and is now the top grossing fulldome film of all time.
Mesmerica was over-the-top! It was an amazing sight and sound experience like nothing I have ever experienced. It was beyond anything I had expected and truly a one of a kind experience. The amazing visuals and the beautiful music was transcending. - Stephen D.
In 2021 a filmmaker named Ryan Moore created the West Coast’s first fulldome film festival called DomeFestWest, which takes place at the planetarium located at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, CA. These fulldome festivals happen all over the world in places like Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada and the US, and there are also professional organizations dedicated to immersive content such as Imersa and IPS, the International Planetarium Society.
We created our next short “The Journey”, which was a sound bath featuring Tibetan singing bowls and vocals performed by top sound bath musicians Michael & Jahna Perricone. I was the lead animator on this project and we not only won Audience Choice Award at DomeFestWest 2021, but we also just successfully completed a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to complete the full project.
Because of this project, the DomeFestWest team asked me to become an official judge for DomeFestWest 2022 after which they nominated me to represent them for the Best of Earth fulldome competition. This competition features the winning films from five fulldome festivals (SATFest in Montreal, Jena Fulldome Festival in Germany, FulldomeUK in England, DomeFestWest in LA, and DomeUnder Festival in Australia) and the judges came together to pick out the top films to win the Best of Earth awards.
I should also mention that the world’s largest fulldome theater is about to open in Las Vegas, the $1.6 billion MSG Sphere. They have built an absolutely massive dome and dispensed with digital projectors choosing instead to use LED screens mapped to a hemispherical projection. U2 is scheduled to be the first band to play there and their first film was directed by none other than Darren Aronofsky. We are all really excited about this because it takes the fulldome world out of the niches and brings immersive entertainment to a mainstream audience.
So that’s what’s happening in my world and you just learned a little more about me. I’m passionate about fulldome and immersive content because I really understand the power it has to change people’s lives and create empathic storytelling. And having watched literally the best dome films in the world I can honestly say that your minds will be blown.
Come join us on May 2nd. You won’t be disappointed!
If you want to know more about fulldome and immersive entertainment feel free to drop me an email to brianna@amore360.com. Check out our website at Amore360.com.
