From a Missed Deadline to Rick Rubin's Lawn: What Festivals Actually Do for a Fulldome Career
- DFW Team
- Aug 17
- 6 min read
Scott Berman missed the Dome Fest West submission deadline. He'd been building a fulldome album film with the band Polyphonic Spree, got busy, and simply ran out the clock. A friend had been telling him for months that this was the festival he needed to be at. So Berman did the only thing that made sense to him: he emailed the festival anyway, thinking he'd reached a different event by mistake, and ended up on a Zoom call with our own Ryan Moore instead.
"You missed the deadline, I can't do anything about it," Moore told him. Berman went to Dome Fest West anyway, as an audience member, with nothing accepted and nothing to show. "That's when really this started," he said later. "Everything that I've done in this space started to take a turn for the better."
That single decision, showing up with nothing to submit, eventually led to a dome erected on Rick Rubin's lawn in Malibu for Neil Young's 80th birthday party. "Had I not gone to Dome Fest West in 2025, not even with my film in, accepted, but just as an audience member, I would have never been able to pull this off," Berman said. The people who helped him build it, Ed Lantz and Stephen Powers, are both people he met at the festival.
This story, and three others like it, came out of our August 13, 2026 Fulldome Forum, a free monthly panel where we pulled together four fulldome creators, spanning music, animation, and narrative film, to talk about what festivals actually do for a career.
Their stories add up to a real argument, not just an inspirational one, for why creators should be submitting and showing up.
The connections you can't make any other way
Berman, who runs Cinephonic Studio, came back the following year with a finished film, "Resolution," a 45-minute visual album made with Polyphonic Spree. It won Best Artistic Film at Dome Fest West. From there, the screenings compounded: 300 shows at the Omni Theater in Fort Worth, 40 shows at the SAT in Montreal, a run at the Adelaide Film Festival, 100 shows lined up in Vancouver. Along the way he met programmers from PBS in Florida who are now working with him on his next film.
"Every festival that I've been to has had an actionable result afterwards," Berman said. "The connections that you make, you can't make them any other way. It's great to see people in person and experience films with them, go have a drink with them afterwards."
A first festival can change everything, fast
Kael Alden didn't set out to make a dome film. He's a composer who spent nearly two decades scoring TV and film in Los Angeles, and Space and Time, his 45-minute psychedelic synth album, started as a solo music project after his company shut down in 2020. He built the visuals around a moon he shot during a lunar eclipse with a telescope in his backyard, and only realized partway through that what he was building could work in a planetarium. He didn't know the term "dome film" existed until he was already making one.
Dome Fest West was the first festival he ever entered. He won Best Musical Feature Film. Months later, he's in conversations with European distributors, his film ran at a conference in Germany through a connection he made at the festival, and he's planning double features with Berman, who he now calls a mentor. "That was probably one of the biggest connections for me from Dome Fest West," Alden said, "realizing that hey, there's us fellow creators, we're all kind of in the same boat here."
Festival wins earn trust that cold outreach can't
Klara Juzova runs Studio Krutart in Prague with two co-founders, all trained in traditional film, not astronomy or planetarium science. Their fulldome film "Little Eve, Stories of Planet Earth" won Best Children's Film at Dome Fest West. For a studio without a planetarium pedigree, she said, that kind of win does something cold outreach can't.
"We had to persuade a lot of people, not only that the films are good, but also that they can trust our films," Juzova said. "Going to festivals, showing our films, and getting some wins really helps us in promoting the film, that it's really something to look at." Planetariums trust festival juries because they're built from experienced people in the field. A win tells a buyer that someone credible already vetted the work. Fulldome has grown into the largest part of Studio Krutart's income, ahead of their traditional television work.
Festivals build institutions, not just careers
Ben Stern, co-founder of Fulldome UK, has watched this play out at the level of entire organizations, not just individual careers. An attendee named Dario came to his festival in 2011, left inspired, and went on to found the Fulldome Database, now a standard reference for the field. Two other attendees, Matt and Yanni of 4Pi Productions, came to the same festival, decided they wanted a permanent home for dome art in the UK, and built Cult VR in Wales. Fulldome UK now holds its own festival inside the venue its own attendees built.
Dome Fest West carries a similar kind of pull. We co-run the Best of Earth award every two years alongside five partner festivals: Fulldome Festival Jena, Fulldome UK, Dome Under Festival, SAT Montreal, and Brno Planetarium, which hosts the award in 2027. Submit to any of these festivals and your film becomes eligible for that award too, a second shot at recognition from a single submission.
The vibe is different, on purpose
Every panelist described the same thing in different words: fulldome festivals are collaborative in a way that surprised them if they came from other corners of the entertainment industry. Ed Lantz, who moderated the panel and has spent time in mainstream film and television, put it plainly: "I feel like I'm swimming with dolphins rather than sharks."
That shows up in small, specific ways. Berman said the community's willingness to help strangers is what got him a dome on a friend's property for a private birthday celebration. Alden said meeting other creators who were "all trying to make this a thing" was as valuable as the award itself. It's not an accident. It's a group of people who know their format is still young enough that everyone benefits when the whole field gets stronger.
What to actually do with this
A few pieces of practical advice came out of the panel, worth acting on before you submit anywhere.
Cut your submission tight. Ben Stern reviews roughly 200 applications for two days of programming at his own festival, and he's blunt about what gets in: "If you've got limited resources, make something great and short. Do not try and stretch those limited resources out over some epic long thing." Alden took that seriously without being told: his finished film is 46 minutes, but the cut he actually submitted to Dome Fest West was 26 minutes and five songs. "You really do got to stick to the highlights," he said. "Get interest, get exposure, and then when people are into it, you can show them the full thing."
Go in person if you can. Berman was unequivocal: "100 percent, traveling to it is worth it." Juzova agreed, with a practical caveat: festival travel costs real time and money, so pick a handful strategically rather than trying to attend everything.
Ask for what you want. Berman's advice, learned from cold-calling a local planetarium director years before any of this: "If you want something to happen, just ask. You'd be amazed at how many people will help you." It's the same instinct that got him on a call with us after he'd already missed the deadline.
Ready to submit
If you're sitting on a fulldome film and wondering whether any of this applies to you, the answer from four creators who didn't know the answer either is yes.
Submissions for DFW27 are open now on FilmFreeway.
Earlybird deadline: August 28, 2026
Regular deadline: October 16, 2026
Late deadline: December 4, 2026
Final deadline: January 8, 2027
Forum Speakers
Scott Berman, Filmmaker, Writer, Creative Director, Cinephonic Studio
Kael Alden, Musician, Composer, Multidisciplinary Digital Artist
Klara Juzova, Co-founder and Head of Content, Studio Krutart
Ben Stern, Founder, Gaia Nova, Co-founder, Fulldome UK
Ed Lantz, Board Chair, Dome Fest West (moderator)
This is a portion of a longer conversation. The full recording is up on YouTube. Fulldome Forums are free, monthly, and open to anyone in the community. Browse upcoming Forums, or suggest and vote on future topics you want us to cover.
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