Inside the DFW26 Lineup: The Films and Creators Behind This Year's Festival
- DFW Team
- Apr 15
- 6 min read
Two weeks before Dome Fest West 2026 opened at Fiske Planetarium, five of the festival's filmmakers joined Ryan Moore for a Fulldome Forum, held April 9, 2026, to walk through what was coming to Boulder. By the time you're reading this, the festival has already happened. That's fine. The films are still real, most of them are still touring, and this is as good a place as any to go looking for something to watch.
You can catch the full session on YouTube, and the full DFW26 catalog is linked below.
Encounters in the Milky Way
Matt Heenan, assistant director of planetarium sales at the American Museum of Natural History, walked through how the Hayden Planetarium builds a show, using Encounters in the Milky Way as the example. Every AMNH show starts with the science: astrophysicist and curator Jackie Faherty built the show around new data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, and the team worked with a scientist at the University of Surrey to build a new model of the Milky Way that includes the galaxy's dust and gas, something most previous visualizations left out.
Director Carter Emmett built the visuals around that science, and one audience question during the Forum got at just how new some of it is: someone asked whether the Oort Cloud shape shown in the film was influenced by something called the Parker spiral. Heenan's answer was basically "there's a paper on that, and I'm not ready to talk about it on camera yet," which says something about how close this show sits to active research. Robert Miller composed the score and recorded it with a full orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in London, and Pedro Pascal narrates.
Unseen Earth and Edge of the Sky
Ondrej Kamenský joined from the Brno Observatory and Planetarium in the Czech Republic to preview two films.
Unseen Earth, which he directed, is an EU-funded international co-production with partner planetariums in Slovakia, Poland, Austria, and Finland, built around Earth observation and the Copernicus satellite program. Because it was publicly funded, it's free: any planetarium can download it at unseenearth.eu, currently in eight languages.
The second film, Edge of the Sky, is a Brno Planetarium production and one of DFW26's award winners. Kamenský described the extremes the crew went to for it: cameras duct-taped to glider planes, a shot from the Very Large Telescope that required setting up equipment, walking away, and hoping for hours that it worked, and a final hyperlapse shot from a camera strapped to a high-altitude weather balloon.
Most of that work, on camera and off, came from the film's screenwriter and lead cameraman, Roman Ponca, a glider pilot himself, who Kamenský said "took way too many risks" making the film. Ponca has talked about the film in more depth in his own director spotlight on this blog.
Resolution
Resolution was Scott Berman's first dome film, though not his first immersive project. He spent decades building analog, multi-projector visual shows for the band Tripping Daisy back in the 90s, and has done visuals for singer Tim DeLotter's music for 35 years. When DeLotter played him early tracks from a new album by the Polyphonic Spree, Berman decided it was time to finally build a planetarium show.
The film is built from nine songs, each rendered in a different animation style by artists from different countries who had never worked in fulldome before, brought together into one dome-ready piece in Cinema 4D. It premiered quietly at the University of North Texas planetarium in Denton, then took off: an audience award at SXSW (the first dome film to win one), a Grammy ballot nod for Best Music Film, and a screening on Rick Rubin's lawn at Shangri-La Studios that turned into an extra three days when Rubin asked Berman to show the film again for Neil Young's 80th birthday.
James Hood's Astronomica
Michael Saul directed Astronomica, the third film in a trilogy with composer and mentor James Hood, following Mesmerica. The score was recorded with the Hungarian National Orchestra, and the visuals came together with a team of international artists, including 3D artist Howard Matthews and VFX artist Jordan Cadby. Saul's advice to filmmakers coming from a traditional cinema background: get into a real dome as early and often as you can. "Even we, after doing it for so many years, we never really know what we're going to see until we actually see it in a dome," he said. Watching your work anywhere else won't tell you what it actually does to an audience.
A Live Laser Show, Built From Scratch
Jeremy Osowski, head laserist at Fiske Planetarium, previewed Saturday night's laser performance, built with local Denver musician Twizzled on the Pangolin Beyond laser control system, the same software used at major concert productions. Osowski's pitch was less about polish and more about a shift already underway in dome content: less pre-programmed packages people can watch on repeat, more live performance built specifically for the room and the night.
The Rest of the DFW26 Lineup
Here's the full 2026 Official Selections catalog. Ryan ran through most of these in the second half of the Forum. A few titles worth knowing: Little Eve: Stories of Planet Earth is Crude Art Studio's follow-up to their earlier hit "3, 2, 1 Liftoff," Kael Alden's "Space and Time" has its own director spotlight on this blog, and The Rift by Four Pie Productions won an award at SATFest before coming to DFW26.
You can browse the entire catalog, with trailers and full synopses, on the DFW26 Official Selections page.
Forum Speakers
Matt Heenan — Assistant Director of Planetarium Sales, American Museum of Natural History
Ondrej Kamenský — Brno Observatory and Planetarium
Scott Berman — Director, Resolution
Michael Saul — Director, Astronomica
Jeremy Osowski — Head Laserist, Fiske Planetarium
This was one of our biggest Fulldome Forums, and it's worth watching in full for the parts that didn't make it into this recap, including Phil Strother's early tests on shooting native fulldome footage that can also work on an IMAX screen. Fulldome Forums are free, monthly, and open to anyone in the community. Browse upcoming Forums, or suggest and vote on the next topic you want us to cover.
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