THE GIANTS IMMERSIVE

Visual Artist Alex Le Guillou led the creative vision behind The Giants Immersive, which began with a clear brief: to transport audiences into Australia’s ancient forests, now existentially threatened by mining and logging. The audiovisual installation expanded upon the 2023 documentary The Giants, a collaboration between Le Guillou and Directors Laurence Billet and Rachael Antony, the latter comprising the Melbourne-based studio, General Strike.

At Bordeaux’s Bassins des Lumières, Culturespaces invited Le Guillou to adapt the film to The Cube, a 360-degree space in a former submarine base transformed into a thriving digital art centre. To begin the adaptation, Le Guillou combined existing visual assets, namely lidar scans and photogrammetric footage of trees and forests, with new images and point-cloud sequences in Unreal Engine and Notch.

The team found Notch 1.0 especially useful for its high-resolution previews, which allowed for rapid iteration and dynamic scene adjustments, and the NotchLC codec, which, in the artist’s words, “integrates perfectly into an After Effects workflow, enabling me to maintain fluidity and spontaneity throughout the design phase.”

Preserving the film’s narrative coherence and emotional resonance proved to be the greatest challenge. The team found their answer in leaning further into the immersive context, employing cylindrical and 360-degree virtual cameras to generate 3D content adapted to the room’s architecture, thus enveloping the space and bringing the audience up close and personal with nature’s fragility and the urgent need for environmental stewardship.