Filmmaker Elad Offer has completed the first feature-length immersive film designed specifically for Apple Vision Pro, creating an unprecedented viewing experience that places audiences directly on stage with U2's Bono. The project required reimagining fundamental filmmaking concepts for spatial media, from camera placement to title sizing. Most significantly, the ultra-high resolution and proximity creates a level of vulnerability impossible in traditional cinema.
Bono: Stories of Surrender (Immersive) transforms the rock icon's one-man stage show into a fully spatial experience that weaves together traditional cinema, immersive on-stage segments, and what Offer calls "Mix Media"—a combination of movie screen with surrounding artwork and animation.
Behind the Lens: Creating cinema for spatial media required solving problems that don't exist in traditional filmmaking.
The project began as supplemental content for the conventional film but expanded dramatically as early tests proved successful. "It started as a smaller project and then I started to have some ideas," Offer explains in recent coverage of the production. "We did some tests and everybody liked it. The producers, the execs at Apple, Bono got excited about this part, that part, and it slowly became this feature length project."
Working with early versions of specialized dual-fisheye cameras, the team had to reconceptualize basic industry standards. Even something as fundamental as title sizing needed complete rethinking for the immersive environment.
"What does that even mean when you're in an immersive space?" Offer asks about traditional sizing rules. "I can have the same amount of pixels, but very close to you and very small, or very far and feeling like the size of the Eiffel Tower."
The technology developed for this production eventually contributed to the creation of the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive Camera, showing how experimental projects can drive hardware innovation.
Stage Presence: The medium exists somewhere between traditional moviemaking and theater, requiring precise spatial relationships.
The key breakthrough came from understanding that emotional effectiveness requires making viewers feel like participants rather than observers. This demanded careful calibration of the intimate distance between camera and performer, creating moments where audiences feel they could reach out and touch Bono.
The film's structure adapts Bono's memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story and his stage show Stories of Surrender: An Evening of Words, Music and Some Mischief. Personal stories about family, faith, loss, and activism are interspersed with live renditions of classic U2 songs, all captured in 8K resolution with spatial audio that envelops viewers in the performance.
One of the most striking elements involves elegant line art that appears to exist physically in space around Bono. Much of this artwork derives from Bono's own iPad drawings, transformed into three-dimensional experiences through careful attention to depth, lighting, and forced perspective effects.
Unfiltered Performance: Ultra-high resolution strips away the protective distance that conventional films provide.
The immersive format creates unprecedented vulnerability for performers. Viewers can see surgical scars and imperfections with startling clarity, removing the barrier that traditional cinema's frame provides.
"When you make a regular movie, you're always protected by that square," Offer notes. "There is a vulnerability that is next level that this specific medium allows for."
This intimacy proves particularly powerful when Bono explores deeply personal themes—his relationship with his late father and spiritual struggles following heart surgery. The spatial audio and 180-degree field of view amplify the emotional resonance of these stories, creating empathy that traditional media cannot replicate.
For Offer, working with Bono proved uniquely rewarding throughout the collaboration process. "The guy gives notes in poetry," Offer laughs, describing the authentic kindness that emanated from the rock icon during production.
Format Shift: This production demonstrates how immersive technology can carry serious artistic weight beyond entertainment spectacle.
As the inaugural feature-length film built for Apple Vision Pro's capabilities, the project serves as proof-of-concept for immersive, artist-centric storytelling. The release underscores Apple's strategy to position Vision Pro as a cutting-edge entertainment platform rather than just productivity hardware.
The film utilizes the Apple Immersive Video format, shot in 8K stereoscopic footage with spatial audio to deliver the full 180-degree experience. While the immersive version remains exclusive to Vision Pro users, a conventional version is available to broader Apple TV+ subscribers.
Tools like DaVinci Resolve are developing native support for immersive formats, and cameras are becoming more accessible, opening new possibilities for emotional storytelling in spatial media.
"There's elements to this medium that have not been used yet," Offer explains. "There's a place there to create an emotion when you feel like you're in something—it's just a different form of storytelling."
Final Cut: This collaboration between technology and artistry establishes a template for future immersive releases.
By proving that immersive cinema can deliver authentic emotional connection beyond technical spectacle, Offer and Bono have created what may truly be, in Bono's words, "a new art medium" entirely. The project's success could directly impact investment in immersive content, the pace of hardware innovation, and artists' willingness to experiment with spatial storytelling.
As production companies like RadicalMedia and Plan B Entertainment continue exploring immersive formats, this landmark collaboration demonstrates that the future of cinema may involve placing audiences not just in front of the story, but inside it.
