It is a happy coincidence – or a real choice – to have located the MADO XR set in the heart of the Epinay-Sur-Seine studios (France) owned by the TSF company, founded more than 100 years ago and emblematic of French and international cinema. If its imposing set up of LED screens, curved, underlines the modernity of the installation, it is to better establish a will of true film set with infinite possibilities.
Discussing MADO XR with its co-founder Lancelot Rumney-Guggenheim.
Cover: Balmain shooting @ MADO XR
MADO XR, a creation during the COVID period
Lancelot Rumney-Guggenheim – With my partner Louis de Castro we have complementary backgrounds. Louis is a visual artist under the pseudonym “Marc Ippon De Ronda” and creative director of ATO Designs, an event production company specialized in scenography. For my part, I have been production director for large-scale events for fashion houses and cultural institutions for the past 10 years. Our paths crossed and Louis invited me to join his structure ATO Designs.
L. R.-G. – After returning from a production in Los Angeles for the Golden Globes, Louis started talking to me about the possibilities of LED technology, widely used on shows such as THE MANDALORIAN (Disney+). For Louis, who is a creative director, this is fascinating. We started by talking to Lux Machina, who developed this technology for Disney, and Epic Games. But the reality of the health situation at the time complicated things.
L. R.-G. – We then launched ourselves alone to create MADO XR – the context offered us one thing, the time to work on this new project. And all the necessary human resources exist here in France! So we started to develop our own solution, the technological bricks. Everything started in our offices with a few screens and sensors. This was necessary in order to meet with the major players in the market, those who could help us, who were already using these technologies – in particular Production Resource Group or PRG (the world’s leading supplier of event technologies, editor’s note), Nvidia for graphics hardwares and Arri for cameras – and then Epic Games. Being able to collaborate with them has accelerated the development of MADO XR’s tools and expertise in 2020.
L. R.-G. – We need to evangelize on XR technologies, real time, virtual production. Especially for schools. We are at the dawn of a revolution, which will change the image industry’s jobs. Before, we had to pre-calculate everything… With real time, it saves time and provides enormous comfort for productions. The obstacle of the XR studio today is not so much budgetary. There is a real ambition to help innovative projects, to find the means of production of tomorrow. There is a lot to imagine. Creative barriers are falling one by one; it’s our imagination that must develop.
From Méliès to MADO XR
L. R.-G. – Being hosted at the Epinay studios is part of MADO’s path. At the beginning, we wrote a proof-of-concept, made a prototype with Mathias Chelebourg and in front of the screen the dancer Fanny Sage. It was a sequence shot (with an Arri TRINITY Steadicam) that we shot several times a day, over a week, to present this demo to potential clients. We showed them the filmed sequence, then they came to the set to understand how we worked. And then everything accelerated. On the one hand, we showed that our system worked and was stable. On the other hand, we received the first requests to shoot! That’s when the idea of a real film studio made sense, for practical and identity reasons. The Epinay studios are the oldest in the world, George Méliès shot there in 1917. TSF and PRG helped us to make this possible.
L. R.-G. – We have worked for industrial groups, fashion houses and musical artists who have welcomed the innovation and capabilities of XR technologies. On the fiction side, these are long-term developments. Expectations on the cinema side can be high (colorimetry, image, camera/screen relationship…) but we have already proven that MADO XR can be adapted to this. We work on case studies to explain all this, we intervene from the development of certain audiovisual projects to set up a working method adapted to this new tool.
Expanding reality … and fiction
L. R.-G. – In MANDALORIAN, there is a bias to do everything in XR or almost everything in XR – and this was undoubtedly an issue of production but also of promotion of the technologies used. For us, it is not a question of overselling our skills: MADO XR is ideal for certain types of shots, but does not exclude traditional outdoor shooting. On our side, we master the hazards of climate, the “golden hours” of sunrise or sunset for example – we can reproduce them ad infinitum. The implementation of tools such as pre-viz or techviz allows us to better prepare the shooting. We can then position the physicality of the action and therefore the real set. The relationship between the physical and virtual set is the key to the immersion of the subject in the image.
L. R.-G. – Our technology is aimed at all industries that produce images. Live action and immersive theater are exciting cases for us, as these are new formats where we can integrate environments and VFX in real time during the performance. We now spend more time in pre-production with the teams involved. We need to think about new formats, to set up an efficient workflow so that the access to these new technologies is facilitated.
Thinking about XR over the long term
L. R.-G. – The XR production sector is developing strongly in Europe – with some big studios setting up in Germany, Spain… With MADO XR, we didn’t intend to operate the studio, but the demand was too strong. So it allows us to test our tools, to work on production methods (techviz, previz, physicality of shots…). Great innovations are to come. Stay tuned.
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