Imagine watching a movie on a planetarium dome. You’ll get your chance in July.

A new way of watching films is coming to Macon, and Middle Georgians will get a sneak peek at the Macon Film Festival next month.

For the first time, the festival will show a “full-dome” film at the Museum of Arts and Sciences’ Mark Smith Planetarium. Full-dome video projects a display onto the full surface of a planetarium dome.

A 10-minute film will stream for the first time on Thursday, July 20, at 7:45 p.m. for opening night.

But this year’s preview is only a hint of what’s to come.

The museum received a $100,000 grant from The Knight Foundation to put on a full-dome festival in July 2018 as a part of next year’s Macon Film Festival.

This year’s film is “Stardancer’s Waltz” by Savannah-based filmmaker and animation professor Diana Reichenbach.

Museum officials commissioned Reichenbach to create a film for them that would stay in their collection.

“We are really excited to premiere a film that can serve as an example for what we can do in the future inside the planetarium,” said Susan Welsh, the museum’s executive director.

Julie Wilkerson, president of the Macon Film Festival’s board of directors, said she thought the full-dome film was a perfect fit for the Thursday night opening event.

“Because the film is short and the planetarium seats about 100 people, we’ll screen it multiple times followed by a Q&A and workshops,” she said.

The film fits the festival’s goals, she said, because it introduces a different kind of film on a different platform.

2018 Full-dome Festival

At the screening, the museum will be announcing details about the 2018 Full-dome Festival.

“It will always run concurrent with the Macon Film Festival. It’s a partnership,” Welsh said. “We’ll basically be a screening site with just full-dome stuff.”

Welsh said because the museum has a state-of-the-art planetarium, a Full-dome Festival seemed like a natural extension.

“We’ve never had anything like this at the film festival or a full-dome film shown in Macon, period,” said Ruth Sykes, the Macon Film Festival marketing chair.

By partnering with the Macon Film Festival, the museum hopes to welcome a whole new group of artists and filmmakers that will capture an entire new audience.

“The projector at the planetarium is very unique, so this is not something that you can see at the Savannah Film Festival or Sundance (Film Festival) because you have to have that piece of equipment,” Wilkerson said.

The museum’s planetarium features the industry’s leading planetarium projection technology — the Konica Minolta Super MediaGlobe II — plus a 44-foot dome, the largest within a 100-mile radius of Macon, according to a release.

“We use the planetarium every day for teaching science, but we also see it as a great opportunity to use it for our focus on art as well,” Welsh said. “There just aren’t a lot of artists working in the full-dome field.”

Welsh said hosting workshops and festivals is their way of supporting the new field. The museum's goal is show the films all year, not just during festival week.

“The more support we can give to these artists, the more content we’ll have,” she said.

This story was originally published June 23, 2017 at 11:55 AM with the headline "Imagine watching a movie on a planetarium dome. You’ll get your chance in July.."