FANTOMATICA

Director
Sandro Bocci

Produced by
Julia Set Lab

Original Music and Sound design
Mishikatomo

Duration
10 minutes

Format
Adaptive (flat, dome, circular, mapping…)

Status
Post-production

Expected Release
Second half of 2025

Genre
Experimental immersive / Spaceart

Visual Approach
All visuals in Fantomatica are handcrafted and entirely non-CGI.

Something moves, even before it has a name.

Fantomatica is a transmedia film project conceived to adapt seamlessly to emerging projection technologies — from immersive cinema and fulldome to video mapping, holographic projections and LED walls.
Visual abstraction is its primary language: a flow of experimental imagery created through live-action sequences and high-resolution, exploratory footage. The soundscape follows the same approach, composed through live sessions with modular synthesizers and immersive sound design.

Synopsis

A subtle energy gathers, contracts, opens: it is not yet form, not yet thought. It is the motionless time in which everything could begin, but has not yet begun. A vibration flows beneath the surface, like an unrealized intuition — a perception balanced between presence and disappearance. A hint appears and immediately withdraws, leaving an ambiguous trace, like an echo without origin.

In this threshold, the meaning of Fantomatica reveals itself: a presence that never fully defines itself, appearing and vanishing in a single gesture, inhabiting the interval between what is real and what is only perceived.

The film unfolds in three movements, like a musical form that does not progress toward resolution but evokes: Emergence, Threshold, Revenant. A continuous flow of images, rhythms, and resonances builds a sensory experience where every meaning remains perceptually suspended, and every form dissolves at the very moment it tries to emerge.

Fantomatica is a visual exploration of what cannot be said — a language of images that expresses the inexpressible. It is a work designed to touch without grasping, existing between what we are certain we have seen and what we may have only imagined.

What is Fantomatica?

The term fantomatyka was coined by Stanisław Lem in his essay Summa Technologiae (1964)
to describe a technology capable of generating fully artificial sensory experiences,
indistinguishable from reality.

FANTOMATICA is a metaphysical tale about perception.

All visuals in Fantomatica are handcrafted and entirely non-CGI.
The film was created using a combination of real fluids, optical phenomena, and specially modified lenses.
Each shot emerges from a physical interaction between light, matter, and movement — captured directly in camera through an artisanal, experimental process.

The spectator is guided through a liminal dream, a non-human point of view, disembodied and wandering in a space of metamorphosis — beyond time and logic.
The aesthetic oscillates between the microscopic and the cosmic, the figurative and the abstract, the organic and the artificial.

Transmedial project

With high-resolution footage and a solid background in immersive cinema, Fantomatica was conceived as a transmedia project designed to seamlessly adapt to a wide range of formats, including immersive cinema and theatre, fulldome projection, video mapping, and large-scale LED installations.

Key crew

Sandro Bocci | producer, film maker

Sara Tassotti | art director, concept design

Mishikatomo | composer, sound designer

Produced by Julia Set Lab

Previous Project

Fantomatica follows the path opened by Cosmonautica, our previous immersive film project that premiered at the CERN in Geneva and was showcased at the Syllepse dome.
Entirely created without CGI, Cosmonautica received international acclaim and was awarded First Prize at Light Year Digital Art 2024 (China) as Best Immersive Work. This recognition affirmed our commitment to pushing the boundaries of sensory cinema through real, in-camera experimentation.