César & Techniques Innovation Award 2019

Born in 1907 with the beginnings of cinema, Eclair is a leader in the technical industries of cinema and audiovisual. A subsidiary of the Ymagis group, we offer innovative solutions across Europe and North America to producers, film and live event distributors, rights holders, cinema exhibitors, advertising agencies, broadcasters, video publishers and VOD/SVOD platform operators. Eclair offers multiple services in the fields of post-production, restoration, multilingual & accessibility, processing of different media, mastering, quality control, digital distribution, preservation and theatrical delivery.

In order to best meet the needs of its customers and partners, Eclair is committed to innovation, invention and anticipation of future market trends by all available means. And it is precisely in order to be able to adapt today’s content to tomorrow’s world that Eclair has become the first company in Europe and the second in the world to acquire a Samsung Onyx Cinema LED screen, thus enabling the maximum exploitation of the capacities of this revolutionary new emissive technology.

Golaem, an Inria spin-off located in Rennes and created in 2009, develops two software programs: Golaem Crowd and Golaem Layout. Golaem Crowd allows artists to place, animate, give various behaviors, and customize the appearance of characters. The artist can very quickly design a scene, and then refine it. It is this last fundamental but often very time-consuming step that we wanted to facilitate with Golaem Layout, which allows to retouch existing simulations without having to restart them. It is for Golaem Layout that we are nominating it for the César & Techniques Innovation Award. It is indeed the only solution on the market for editing simulations, which allows to drastically reduce the number of iterations needed. This solution does not only allow us to retouch our own simulations, but also those from Massive, Houdini, … It is also possible for rapid settlement to avoid the simulation step and work directly on movements produced by animators or motion capture. The edition, being interactive, allows live validation of the modifications by the supervisor or the director, thus avoiding many simulation iterations. Golaem Layout brings a unique gain in productivity without altering the visual quality produced.

Golaem’s software is used by hundreds of customers worldwide, for example for the following films The Sisters Brothers, J. Audiard, 2018; Like Boys, J. Hallard, 2018; Rémi sans famille, A. Blossier, 2018; Black Panther, R. Coogler, 2018; The Nutcracker and the Four Kingdoms, L. Hallström & J. Johnston, 2018; Les animaux fantastiques: les crimes de Grindelwald, D. Yates, 2018; Au revoir là-haut, A. Dupontel, 2017; 120 beats per minute, R. Campillo, 2017. Golaem is the recipient of a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award 2018 for its significant contribution to the field of television production, as our solutions are used on dozens of TV series and other TV movies, including the prestigious Game of Thrones series.

Les Fées Spéciales is a studio for the production and manufacture of animated films that accompanies auteur films as well as heritage or scientific projects. Les Fées was thus able to work on the layout, crowd animation and technical supervision of the sets for Michel Ocelot’s feature film, “Dilili à Paris”. More recently, the studio created an hour of animated and interactive content for the renovation of the Museum of Lodève (Hérault). The studio is committed to the use and creation of open source tools and has an R&D team that creates the necessary tools to meet growing demands and needs. To answer the complex problems of manufacturing follow-up, and to compensate for the lack of adapted solutions for small and medium sized studios, Les Fées Spéciales, helped by the CNC and in partnership with CGWire, participated in the creation of the Kitsu software. The solution, which facilitates the internal and external collaboration of any audiovisual project, is free and its development is now shared with other studios (including Unit Image, Cube Creative, Tu Nous Za Pas Vus, Autour de Minuit, …).

You can discover and test the Kitsu solution on www.cg-wire.com.

TITRAFILM was founded in 1933 in Paris by two brothers, inventors of subtitling, at a time when cinema films, which had become talking, were to continue to travel around the world.

Almost a century later, TITRAFILM remains a family business, specializing in audio post-production, international localization (subtitling and dubbing in more than 30 languages), accessibility (subtitling for the deaf and hearing-impaired and audiodescription for the blind) and in the creation of broadcast elements for cinema, television channels and digital platforms (Netflix, Google, Itunes…). Based in Saint Ouen, TITRAFILM has about fifteen recording and mixing studios.

Its services meet the technical and artistic needs of producers, distributors and broadcasters of feature and short films, fiction and animation series and all documentary and flow programs.

The MyTitra platform, highlighted this year for the 2019 César et Techniques Innovation Prize, is symbolic of the dynamism that animates this 85-year-old startup every day.