César & Techniques Innovation Award 2020

Golaem, a spin-off of Inria located in Rennes and created in 2009, develops two softwares: 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 the new version of Golaem Layout that we are nominating it for the César & Techniques Innovation Award. It is in fact the only solution on the market that, in addition to performing simulation retouching, now also allows you to completely free yourself from the simulation stage. It is in fact possible with the help of a new nodal editor to compose scenes by working directly on the assembly and retouching of thumbnails composed of characters and movements produced by animators or by motion capture. This new nodal editor provides a set of basic operations that can be applied to selected selections of characters in the scene. Another major advantage of this new solution is that it is totally independent and works similarly in several tools of the production chain: Maya, Houdini, Katana, Unreal Engine.

Golaem’s software is used by hundreds of customers worldwide, for example for the following films in 2019 : The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily, L. Mattotti; Playmobil, the movie, L. DiSalvo; The Barons, A. Berloff; The Addams Family, G. Tiernan & C. Vernon; Godzilla II King of Monsters, M. Dougherty; Jumanji: Next Level, Jake Kasdan; Le Mans 66, J. Mangold; Ni no Kuni, Y. Momose; One Piece: Stampede, T. Ōtsuka; Yesterday, D. Boyle. In April 2019, Golaem received a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award for its significant contribution to the field of television production, as our solutions are also used in dozens of TV series and movies, including the prestigious Game of Thrones series.

Small is a label of the Mac Guff studio, which draws on 30 years of experience in the field of special effects for fiction, documentary and animation. Its team demonstrates a great know-how around game industry technologies and special effects to create new experiences in the field of immersive content.

Over the last 3 years, Small has co-produced and post-produced several high quality virtual reality experiences, such as Ayahuasca: Kosmik Journey and 7 Lives by director Jan Kounen (selected in numerous festivals around the world). Small has also worked on 3 of the 7 experiments in the VR collection for Arte Trips, Veronese’s Les Noces de Cana, Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies Bergères, Rousseau’s Les Rêves du Douanier and -22°7, by musician Molécule. Last year, the studio produced the Sébastien Loeb Racing Experiment virtual reality experiment for the Futuroscope in Poitiers, considered the most popular RV experience in the world with 1.2 million users per year. Mixing virtual reality and 4DX effects, the user experiences a ride as a co-driver of the famous rally driver, installed in a movie theater equipped with 108 dynamic seats.