Cathedral Immersive Experience, Bordeaux

Luminiscence immersive experience magnifies the Bordeaux Cathedral with Modulo Pi’s Media Servers

From October 13 to January 6, 2024, the Luminiscence show illuminated the Cathedral of St Andrew of Bordeaux. Conceived and produced by LOTCHI, the Luminiscence project aims to sublimate the most beautiful houses of worship through an immersive and multi-sensory experience.

The project presented a number of challenges, particularly linked to the size of the Bordeaux cathedral. “The cathedral is almost the equivalent of a football pitch, with a projection area that was over 90m long, 30m high, and 20m wide,” points out Olivier Danna, Co-founder and Production Director at LOTCHI. “This made it possible to accommodate 900 people, with two performances each evening, or 1,800 people in total.” 

To light up such a venue, 33 x Barco G100-W22 video-projectors were installed, powered by 8 x Modulo Player media servers from Modulo Pi, equipped with 4 and 6 outputs.

LOTCHI teamed up with Ateliers BK to create a 35-minute show and highlight the architecture of the Gothic edifice, while telling its story.

 The result was an image over 24,000 x 6,000 pixels. Modulo Player‘s warping tools proved essential to the project, enabling to map the nave, arcades, and ribbed vault typical of the Gothic style. “The powerful warping capabilities of Modulo Player allowed us to easily distorte our media so that they perfectly fit the architecture,” explains Olivier Danna.

In this context, the technical teams relied on the media server’s X-Map function which offers a 2D workflow to easily handle warping areas independently of each other.

 To offer the audience a complete experience, the sound dimension has been carefully considered, with the installation of 24 x speakers and 6 x subwoofers from K-array. A lighting system was also implemented, including 50 x Colorzoom projectors from OXO light, 8 x Sharpy and 4 x Arolla projectors from Claypaky, as well as a grandMA3 console from MA Lighting.

All the images, sound tracks and control timecode for the various devices involved were played by Modulo Player.

 Initially scheduled to run from October 13 to December 17, 2023 in Bordeaux, Luminiscence was extended until January 6, 2024 due to its success. All in all, over 90,000 spectators attended the experience.

Building on this success, teams of LOTCHI have come up with a new Luminiscence experience, which has been installed in the Saint-Eustache Church in Paris, since February 16, 2024.