Full Dome Demo Reel: a chance to take a look back at our immersive films

First, a short 360-degree trailer of our full dome productions, just for your viewing pleasure.

We love making films for planetariums, we’re proud of it and we wanted to share that pride in a trailer. It has to be said that our films draw on all our skills. In a sense, all 3D emotion can be summed up in these productions: our love of 3D animation, our curiosity about scientific subjects, and our inclination for original broadcasting techniques.

Virtual reality before its time

First of all, we were the first in France to produce immersive full dome 3D films. This means 3D everywhere you look, in a 360-degree format. In 2010, when our film Planets was released, this was something that was difficult to achieve and had never been done before.

Since then, publishers have had time to propose solutions to studios, but at the time virtual reality didn’t yet exist, and we had to create our own tools to meet this demand.

Impertinent as we are, we didn’t wait for the advent of virtual reality to make our own. And we enjoyed experimenting with the 360-degree format in our productions. We’ve tried out a lot of things when it comes to directing, and we’ve learned a lot more too.

Placing the action, constructing the narrative in an open format, managing shots, camera position and movement – we’ve been testing all these things since our first planetarium film, The race to Earth.

As our work has progressed, we have perfected our methods. One of them is to preview our immersive films using an Oculus headset, which is the best way for us to test our directorial choices.

Without realising it, we were already experimenting with virtual reality. After all, what is virtual reality if not a mini planetarium? You could even say that the VR headset is to the planetarium what television is to the cinema: an individual version of an experience that has long been tried and tested in public.

But our expertise doesn’t stop at immersive and virtual reality.

Immersive films, but also films to popularise science

As we said in the introduction, our productions bear witness to our scientific side, since each in its own way unfolds educational content (more or less specialised depending on the film).

While our productions have taken us to a variety of subjects (marketing, retail, medical, industry, real estate), it is above all astrophysical and environmental issues that have most appealed to our scientific spirit.

Because to bring these subjects to life, you first have to be completely committed to them and immerse yourself in cutting-edge issues (enough to forge a real general knowledge). Then you have to be able to process data supplied by professionals.

Very early on, our productions led us to manipulate scientific data to make films or applications for the general public.

For planetariums, we represented various cosmic bodies under the watchful eye of cosmologists and planetarists (stars, planets, nebulae, galaxies). We have also worked with institutions to produce films and applications on a wide range of issues, requiring us to work closely with specialists.

All of these projects involved introducing information directly from simulations or surveys. In each case, not only was scientific rigour required, but the documents we were working with were data specific to their field that we had to understand and process. Data that we had to be able to read, integrate and transform without touching the information it contained.

So it’s a skill that goes beyond the job of computer graphics designer, animator and director. It’s a sort of 3D emotion supplement, a geeky side and a natural curiosity shared by the whole team.