Hidden behind two passcode-protected doors in a nondescript office complex just outside of La Rochelle, France, sits the Bunker – ICE Theaters’ state-of-the-art, highly protected facility where visual magic gets made.
Since 2017, five post-production whizzes have manned the studio’s 15 monitors and countless processors – all of them unconnected to one another and to the wider net in one of many security measures – encoding blockbusters frame by frame to build out an ever-growing library of ICE embellished features.
Working for the premium offshoot of French exhibitor CGR Cinemas, ICE technicians work on 30 Hollywood productions per year, mining visual information from the furthest reaches of each anamorphic frame in order to design bespoke light shows that play out on the two rows of LED screens built into every ICE immersive theater.
“Our process and principle is to engage,” says ICE exec Alexandre Brouillat. “Our job is – and always will be – to plunge the spectator into the heart of the film and to never let them leave. Like goldsmiths, our team works with precision to nourish the viewers’ peripheral vision with new information.”
As it builds off the far edges of any given frame, extending action and movement onto the 10 panels that line the ICE Theater wall, this new visual information must above all plunge the viewer back into the film – honing the viewer’s focus on the filmmaker’s choices rather than pulling that attention away. In practical terms, that means aligning the visual reverberations to the rhythms of the source text.
“We think of movies like roller-coasters,” Brouillat explains. “We can make a propulsive narrative explode by adding additional layers, accompanying action scenes with extra details and lighting effects while augmenting and enlarging the environment [once things slow down].”
Calling themselves “conductors of immersion,” the ICE tech crew had a field day with lush and visually exuberant titles like last year’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” and the recent “Super Mario Bros. Movie,” while confronting different creative challenges when working in a wholly different genre.
Courtesy of CGR Cinemas
“Horror films thrive in the dark,” says creation and post-production VP Thomas Tafforeau. “In such cases we try to keep our side panels as discreet as possible, to have them work in accordance with the shot. We can dim the panels as if in a cave lit only by a lamp, and then we can take small liberties to accentuate the dread and fear. With jump scares or sudden violence, we can use the light to accentuate the music – to mark the emotion, surprise and horror with sudden flashes of red, for example.”
Some filmic choices prove more daunting than others, as ICE technicians prefer to work on films formatted in scope rather than 16:9 or academy ratios, while the traditional shot-reverse-shot editing technique has forced a different set of solutions.
“In order to avoid a ping pong effect in such instances, we instead try focus on the ambiance,” says Tafforeau. “If two characters are speaking with one another in an orange room, we can build on that color code, as there are millions of shades of orange. Rather than switching up the panel patterns for each shot, we can make the viewers feel like they’re in the room with the characters during dialogue heavy scenes.”
While ICE’s main bunker encodes roughly 30 studio titles per year, a second, smaller studio is set to go live. Just down the hall from the larger facility in the company’s La Rochelle headquarters, the bunker-annex will tackle another 20 Bollywood projects. Once fully encoded (and sent back to the producers for validation), each ICE embellished film is ready for release in affiliated theaters.
And as the tech crew cuts through a workload nearly 50 films strong, they’ve also taken a look backwards, toying with the idea of encoding classic films and ever-popular repertory titles. If given free rein, and the keys to the locked-down bunker, the ICE creative brass would love to get their hands around the original “Star Wars” trilogy, to add the modern blockbuster’s foundational text to a growing ICE Theater catalog.