Spectaculaires: Monumental Visions
An unforgettable spectacle unfolds each summer night in the Place Stanislas, an 18th-century public square in Nancy, France. Fantastical animated images illuminate the grand façade of the square’s Hôtel de Ville, transforming the ornate building into a gigantic, motion-filled canvas.
Behind these epic projections is Spectaculaires, a Rennes, France-based firm that specializes in unique lighting designs for shows and events. To create and display the vast images that light up Place Stanislas and other monumental locations, Spectaculaires relies on a pair of large-format projectors, three Mac Pros, Adobe Creative Suite, and Motion, the motion graphics software included in the Final Cut Studio suite.
“Without hesitation, we looked to Apple solutions on both the hardware and software sides,” says Franck Marty, one of the principal artists behind the project. “We boosted our Mac Pros with a RAID system and threw ourselves into Motion — which, considering the user-friendly conception of the software, was an easy task.”
Franck Marty of Spectaculaires.
Photo by Benoït Quéro/Jean Marc Charles.
The Place Stanislas installation is just one of Spectaculaires’ ambitious architectural light shows. Since the late 1990s, they’ve also illuminated the Cannes Exhibition Center, the Casino at Monte Carlo, the Bordeaux Opera House, the Rennes City Hall, and festivals, cultural gatherings, and sporting events throughout France.
From the beginning, the Mac has helped Spectaculaires conceive and produce their visions. “When you have tight deadlines, you need a stable hardware system with a stable operating system,” Marty says. “We need a high-performance system that’s easy to set up and manage, with no viruses, and simple ways to share data between all the systems in the company. And the Mac gives us exactly that!"
Rendezvous at Place Stanislas
Place Stanislas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has gone through many incarnations over its 250 years — it was even used as a parking lot before being restored to its 18th-century glory. To celebrate the square’s renewal, in 2007 the city of Nancy asked Spectaculaires to create a summer event for both residents and tourists that reflected the region’s rich cultural history.
Spectaculaires proposed a pageant of animated images projected across the Hôtel de Ville’s 95-meter-wide façade, bringing the imposing architecture to life. “It seemed obvious that the narration of the show couldn’t rely on text,” says Marty. “We had to choose a more universal language: sound, light, image. Nancy is a city of art and history, so we took advantage of this.”
With just two months to produce 15 minutes of precision animation, the team turned to the Mac. Spectaculaires founder Benoït Quéro prepared a script with Franck Marty and Fred Reno; then Reno and Vincent Le Meur concentrated on the soundtrack while Marty and Clément Barré focused on images and animation.
“We decided to work on Mac Pro systems loaded with the most powerful graphic cards available at that time, and we also shared a RAID storage system,” says Barré. “As for software, we used Final Cut Studio, particularly Motion, as well as Shake and the whole Adobe Creative Suite.”
