Storytelling for Fulldome Film – Cutting Through Dimensions

Abstract

“Storytelling is storytelling is storytelling is storytelling.” This is how Gertrude Stein, the American novelist, put all reality into a row of repeating it 4 times, stating that things are what they are. That is true, storytelling for fulldome film is first of all storytelling for film, and only in a second additional step is the visitor considered in an immersed environment, surrounded by the screen. Then the scriptwriter for fulldome adds the 3^rd, the 4^th and the 5^th dimension, already working as a director.

Aristotle taught us more than 2000 years ago, how drama works: evoke compassion, feeling with the heroes. To achieve this empathy, to make the spectator cry or laugh, the scriptwriter needs to reach out to the spectator’s emotions, touch his feelings. “Tragedy is the imitation of action arousing pity and fear”, Aristotle says. The interest of the spectator goes with the characters and their destiny, and that is the same for fulldome as well as for all other films.

In theory for scriptwriting lots of Hollywood gurus repeat Aristotle’s basics: an archetype’s personage, action, conflict, and all that in 3 acts. Or in other words: boy meets girl and they live happily ever after, or, in alternative dramaturgy, they do not.