We just returned from this year's edition of the Fulldome Festival in Jena, Germany – the oldest and best known festival solely focused on fulldome content.

We attended the event from beginning to end, making sure to take notes of all the workshops and screenings in the program so that we could report the event's hot topics over the next few days.

Let's begin from the end: the Awards. The Jury – which worked independently from the Festival organizers, and any company or institution – was composed by the following experts:

• Lawrence Curtis: underwater cinematographer and filmmaker (Florida, USA);
• Shawn Laatsch: Planetarium Director (Infoversum, NL) and President Elect for the International Planetarium Society;
• Bernd Vorjans: Director of JenaKultur (Jena, DE);
• Christian Holtzhauer: Artistic Director of the Kunstfest Weimar Arts Festival (Weimar, DE)
• Susanne Huttemeister: Planetarium Director (Zeiss-Planetarium Bochum, Germany) and Professor of Astronomy (Ruhr-University Bochum, DE).

The Janus FullDome Awards were assigned to 9 out of 94 contributions eligible for awards:

• Directors Award: the jury decided to split the award to acknowledge two contributions: Habitat Earth, by California Academy of Sciences and "Starlight", by Melbourne Planetarium.
• Creative Award: "Jalousien", by Aljoscha Seuss (Fachhochschule Potsdam, Germany).
• Performance Award: "Am Ende eines langen Tages", by Christian Öhl (Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, Germany), and Philipp Boß (Hochschule Darmstadt, Germany)
• Audience Award: "Ein abnormes Liebeserleben", by Deike Schwarz, Jonas Eichhorn and Perschya Chehrazi (Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach Germany)
• First Year Students’ Award: "Άπειρο" by Kelly Spanou, Camilo Zúñiga (Royal College of Arts, London, UK)
• Blaue Blume Award: "Obscure Path (The Flower of Afterimage)", by Fusako Baba (Sapporo, Japan)
• Emphasis on Emotion Award: "Walls Have Ears", by Mohammad Jaradat (Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany)
• Emphasis on Emotion Award: the jury decided to split the award to acknowledge two contributions: "Walls Have Ears", by Mohammad Jaradat (Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany) and "Green Grass and Pretty Girls", by Bigyan Mani Dixit (Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany)
• Best Fulldome Short Film + Audio Award: "My Little Brother Jimmy", by Thomas Bannier (Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, Germany)
• Award for Use of Innovative Production Technologies: "Fermentation", by Masahige Iida (Moriya, Japan)

Stay tuned for more posts about the Festival!

Photo Credit: Michael Shomann