Paris welcomes 2020 with memorable Barco video mapping

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 UDX projectors.

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 the creative studios Holymage and Spectre Lab for the artistic direction and production. For the technical realization of the festivities they went to Magnum: setting up and adjusting the projectors, the sound equipment and the lighting - all in perfect synchronization. 
In terms of technical set-up, 15 Barco UDX-W32 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 PI media servers which were used for video mapping and show playback. The show was filmed by 6 cameras and displayed live on 4 giant screens placed along the Champs-Elysées avenue.
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. 

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