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Open Innovation
A long-standing partnership between Open Innovation and Paris Digital Lab
For the sixth consecutive year, the partnership between Open Innovation team of France Télévisions and Paris Digital Lab has fostered collaboration around highly innovative projects. Several prototypes have already been developed in the past: a plant recognition app for “Silence, ça pousse !”, a game promoting eco-friendly consumption on the france.tv player, and the ViewFinder-SplatTool, an application designed for directors to quickly generate set designs.
A group of four students from CentraleSupélec school worked with Les Tontons Truqueurs on challenge for this new experiment: is it possible to quickly and easily generate dynamic backgrounds that respect parallax for LED walls - in just two months?
Les Tontons Truqueurs and the students met on a weekly basis to adress this ambitious challenge. The students presented their progress and benefited from feedback from France tv Studio’s industry experts, helping them refine both technical and functional directions. This dynamic of frequent exchanges over a short period is central to the process: it enables students to align their work with real-world needs and constraints, while offering the Tontons Truqueurs’s teams fresh perspectives on their challenges and potential solutions.
An innovative approach to using LED walls
LED walls represent a major evolution in production techniques. These large-scale screens display photorealistic digital environments in real time around actors, creating immersive visuals directly on set. Unlike green screens, the images projected emit natural light, allowing production teams to film in diverse environments without leaving the studio.
Thanks to these systems, directors can project dynamic digital environments that adapt in real time to camera movements. Among the many possibilities offered by LED walls, here are a few examples:
Simulating a car driving scene with realistic reflections on the bodywork and mirrors, without needing to block off real roads
Broadcasting pre-recorded panoramic footage, such as a public square or a city street
The emergence of techniques such as Gaussian Splatting (which transforms 2D photos into ultra-realistic and fluid 3D scenes by assembling millions of small color points in space) further enhances these capabilities by enabling fast capture and reconstruction of real-world environments in 3D. These captured scenes can then be integrated into LED walls to faithfully recreate real locations. Such innovations open up new possibilities for more immersive and flexible productions.
When the camera moves within the scene or when lighting conditions in the background need to change, LED walls can also display a fully simulated 3D environment rendered in real time using the Unreal Engine game engine in some shoots. These environments are prepared in advance by teams of graphic artists to provide the desired level of interactivity: camera freedom, multiple lighting conditions, animations and more.
Through this project with students from CentraleSupélec, Les Tontons Truqueurs aimed to explore new types of virtual environments and design a prototype that could be tested in their studios. The tool was intended for graphic designers, enabling them to generate simple environments within hours using text prompts and reference images. The resulting environment could then be integrated and manipulated in Unreal Engine, allowing animations to be added and bringing the created scenes to life.
ABOUT France tv Studiofrance.tv studio is an audiovisual production company with nearly 40 years of experience across multiple areas: production (fiction, documentaries, entertainment and live events), accessibility (including subtitling and audio description), dubbing, multilingual subtitling, self-promotion, journalistic content production, virtual production, animation, and studio rental through its subsidiaries.
More information: https://francetvstudio.fr/
ABOUT Les Tontons Truqueurs
LTT is a pioneering company in virtual production. Through the deployment of previs-on-set technology on France TV’s daily series Un Si Grand Soleil, and the production of more than six seasons and 1,400 episodes, the Tontons Truqueurs has developed strong expertise and an industrialized vision of production processes—from set creation to final VFX delivery. The LTT studio offers a full range of proprietary tools dedicated to virtual production within its Vendargues facilities. Its ambition has always been to achieve both artistic excellence and technological efficiency.
More information: https://www.ltt-vfx.com/
