2020 celebration, Paris

2020 celebration in Paris with a sound and light show based on Barco projectors, and Modulo Pi’s media servers

For the 6th year in a row, the Champs-Elysées avenue shone brightly for New Year’s Eve celebrations. After winning the tender launched by the city of Paris, Cookies Production produced a spectacular sound and light show relying on 15 Barco’s video-projectors and 4 Modulo Player media servers by Modulo Pi.

On December 31, more than 400.000 people gathered on the Champs-Elysées avenue to celebrate New Year’s Eve. The crowd of tourists and Parisians could enjoy a magnificent show projected on the Arc de Triomphe, which included music, video mapping, and pyrotechnics.

After answering the call for tenders initiated by the city of Paris, Cookies Production was awarded with the challenge of producing the new show to enter 2020. Christophe Gillier, CEO of Cookies Production, explains: “The city was looking for a fresh artistic proposal. While the budget for the project remained the same as the previous edition, I wanted us to achieve something even better. Better because we would deeply exchange and have the technical, artistic, and pyrotechnics teams collaborate.”

In order to produce the show, which is now highly expected and observed every year, Cookies Production worked with Magnum for the technical production, and the creative studios Holymage and Spectre Lab for the artistic direction and production.

In terms of technical set-up, 15 Barco UDX video-projectors were used for the show. “We reached about 470.000 lumens, and more than 300 lux per square meter. This was a first for the Arc de Triomphe” comments Christophe Gillier.

The 15 video-projectors were fed by 4 Modulo Player Pro media servers which were used for video mapping and show playback. Baptiste Jazé, media server operator on the show, states: “Modulo Player embeds some warping tools that are very accurate and allow to work fast. Once the first stack of 5 video-projectors is warped, adding the two other stacks is very simple thanks to the X-Map function.”
Besides, the Modulo Player Pro were equipped to receive timecode: “Modulo Player’s capability to work with timecode is essential in a show that must strictly follow the countdown. It also ensures the synchronization of the video, light, firework, and laser effects” notes Baptiste Jazé.
In addition, Modulo Player’s LED mapping function allowed to convert video content into DMX. This way, the creative studios could work on the lights located underneath the Arc de Triomphe’s vault at the same time as video effects, ensuring video and light were perfectly synced.

Under the instigation of Cookies Production, this year’s edition was placed under the theme of music. For the first time, the celebrations started at 9pm with a live DJ set show.
At 11:20pm, a pre-show with music and images representing fun facts and figures about the French capital was projected on the Arc de Triomphe. Finally, the sound and light show started at 11:45pm. Images of Paris and majestic musical instruments were transforming the Arc de Triomphe on a soundtrack made of French house artists. The sound and light show continued flawlessly with the countdown to 2020, marked by an impressive firework with 2.700 shots.

The show was filmed by 6 cameras and displayed live on 4 giant screens placed along the Champs-Elysées avenue.