Director Spotlight: Roman Ponca on Weather Balloons, Gliders, and a Cougar in Patagonia

Roman Ponca spent an hour on his back in the Patagonian grass, camera rolling on a timelapse, while a cougar watched him from a distance. That shot never made the final cut of "Edge of the Sky." The shot that did is a single continuous timelapse from two 360-degree cameras strapped to a weather balloon, climbing through cloud layer after cloud layer until nothing is left in the frame but the Blue Marble. It's the moment audiences bring up first, almost every time.

"Edge of the Sky" won Best Narrative at DFW26. What follows is a fulldome filmmaker interview in Ponca's own words: the technical grind of shooting natively for the dome, the sound design underneath it, how the film played for a live audience at Fiske, and what a planetarium weighing whether to book it should know.

Figure 1: Roman Ponca accepts the Best Narrative trophy for "Edge of the Sky" on the DFW26 awards stage.

Three Strangers, One Sky

The film follows a glider pilot, an astronomer, and a young girl, three people who never meet but share the same sky. "Everyone likes looking at clouds and imagining what their shapes represent," Ponca said. "Even though we like to think of ourselves as a highly advanced species, everyone on Earth is still strongly influenced by clouds and weather in general. In a way, they connect us all. That was our main idea: to tell the story of clouds through the eyes of our protagonists."

That idea is simple enough to fit on a napkin. Making it work on a dome was not. Ponca and his team shot natively in fulldome from the start, which meant a great deal of time spent crouched under a 220-degree lens in places that don't reward crouching. Only one or two shots needed adapting for the format at all, mostly moments meant to show something small in the distance, which Ponca says never quite translates. Everything else on the technical list, representing something as white and diffuse as clouds while holding onto contrast and depth, rigging cameras to a glider and then to a stratospheric weather balloon, explains why the film took as long as it did. Ponca sums up the workaround in five words: "our 3D printer and duct tape, quite a lot of it."

Figure 2: A frame from "Edge of the Sky," the glider pilot character in the field before takeoff, screened at Fiske Planetarium.

The Cougar

Ponca doesn't dwell on the story. When it comes up, he treats it like a minor cost of doing business. "Not a pleasant feeling," he said, and left it there. But it's hard not to read that hour on his back in the grass, lens up, letting an apex predator decide whether he was worth the trouble, as something close to a thesis statement for how the film got made.

"Fulldome has its restrictions and limitations, but those constraints actually motivate you to discover new and unique perspectives. It's pure joy."

Roman Ponca

Get low. Get still. Stay there, even with something watching you from the grass. That is native fulldome production, reduced to its essentials.

A Shot That Only Works on a Dome

The payoff arrives in the film's final sequence: two 360-degree cameras on a weather balloon, rising through the atmosphere until only Earth, the Blue Marble, fills the screen. It's the shot from the opening of this piece, the one Ponca says audiences bring up before anything else. "That scene definitely would not work in a flat-screen format," he said. "You need to be inside the shot as a viewer, fully present and surrounded by it from every direction."

Figure 3: The glider climbs through cloud layer after cloud layer on the full dome screen at Fiske Planetarium, exactly the kind of shot Ponca says only works in fulldome.

Sound That Fills the Dome

None of it lands the way it does without the score. "Audio plays a huge role in our film," Ponca said. "We knew that the music especially needed to be strong and monumental to accompany such dynamic atmospheric phenomena."

He found his composer the way a lot of good collaborations happen in this community: at a previous Dome Fest West. "Fortunately, at DFW 2025 we met the incredible Camilo Posada, who did such a wonderful job," Ponca said. "I still say it feels like a miracle." Posada is a composer and sound designer who has scored other fulldome projects, including original music for fulldome video albums.

Ponca wants to push the audio even further next time. "In the future, we would also like to focus more on spatial audio design, which opens many exciting possibilities," he said.

What Filled the Room at Fiske

Watching the film with a live audience at Fiske Planetarium was its own kind of test, and Ponca's first instinct was to catalog everything he would have done differently. "At first, I was only thinking about all the mistakes I made and what I would shoot differently," he said. "Jokes aside, the projection was wonderful, and I felt incredibly fortunate simply to have the opportunity to share our work with such amazing creators in the planetarium."

This is Ponca's first story-driven, non-educational fulldome piece, so the audience's reaction to the narration meant something extra. "I really appreciated the kind words about our narration and storytelling approach," he said. "I was very happy to hear that."

Figure 4: Ponca at the mic, taking in the Best Narrative trophy moments after accepting it.

Built to Travel

Planetarium and dome venue programmers deciding whether "Edge of the Sky" fits their calendar might want to know this: Ponca built it to travel. "Our target audience is quite broad, but I feel that the show is really about the experience itself," he said. "That's why I believe it can work equally well in both large and smaller domes."

In practice, that means a programmer isn't locked into one kind of screening. A film built around three ordinary people looking at the same sky doesn't need a curriculum tie-in or an age bracket to make sense. It can headline a general evening show or anchor something more specialized.

Advice for the Next Generation

Ponca's advice for filmmakers coming from live-action backgrounds: "Take your camera and go outside. The best ideas rarely come while sitting indoors. Don't get stuck, shoot, experiment, and keep iterating. It's a journey."

What's Next

Ponca is already at work on his next project: more narrative storytelling, 3D live-action footage, and, in his words, "a lot of deep space." He thinks the format itself is moving fast too. "The fulldome format is evolving rapidly thanks to technology," he said. "Single-lens cameras are becoming smaller and more capable, allowing filmmakers to think differently without unnecessary technical limitations."

See the full list of DFW26 award winners.

Somewhere between the weather balloon and whatever comes next, Ponca has settled into a way of working: get outside, accept the limits of the format, and let them show you something you wouldn't have found otherwise.

DFW27 submissions open July 7. If your film belongs on a dome, this is where directors like Ponca got their start. If you program a dome, this is where you find your next show.