HPHS to Host Landmark Fulldome Festival
This film festival makes the big screen look like a bulletin board.
Highland Park High School will host Real Imagined: A Festival of Short Fulldome Films in its state-of-the-art Digitarium at Pierce Planetarium from Oct. 3 to 6. The event will feature nine films that will be projected onto the digitarium’s entire dome, giving viewers a truly immersive experience.
As far as the team at the Moody Innovation Institute knows, the festival will be the first of its kind in the world to be held by any high school, said Geoffrey Orsak, the institute’s executive director.
“I just want to push the limit on what is possible for us, and what our kids can be exposed to,” he said.
Some of the international films, like Germany’s The Inner Island and Suprematism, are inspired by the past, while others, such as Columbia’s Sublime, draw inspiration from the future. The event will also feature live musical and spoken performances, including works from the Dallas Poet Laureate, the Dallas Youth Poet Laureate, and poet, musician and visual artist Lisa Huffaker.
The films range in length from four to 10 minutes. Though short, they’re visually intense with powerful messaging. One focuses on the unpredictability of data and how that parallels the unpredictability of human relationships. Another, created in the style of a paper collage, deals with the impact of climate change on the migration of birds.
“It’s like looking at a modern work of art,” Orsak said. “There’s a message in there someplace. Maybe you see it. Maybe you don’t. And that’s how these films operate.”
The Moody Advanced Professional Studies Program partnered with Diversion Cinema, a Parisian company that has managed some of the world’s largest festivals, to bring the fulldome films to the high school.
It also relied heavily on Glenys Quick, HP’s digitarium specialist and main groups lead, who worked to become a self-taught film festival expert, Orsak said. Quick had already introduced the idea of live performances to the digitarium.
“Fulldome is so new,” she said. “(The festival is) kind of introducing people to fulldome and the beauty of the things that the artists are creating.”
Highland Park plans to have seven screenings of the fulldome films. Four will be just for HPISD students, including those in the Moody Advanced Professional Studies program, on Thursday, Oct. 3, and Friday, Oct. 4.
The remaining three showings, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 5, and at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 6, will be open to the public.
Quick said that cinema seemed like a “bulletin board” to her after experiencing the fulldome films.
“These are really powerful ideas,” Orsak said. “Getting to the artist’s expression of complex ideas that are really important is, I think, what these fulldome films can do better than anything else.”
Still images from the films are below.
