Inside the ICE Theaters Bunker Where Screen Magic Is Made

variety.com:

Ben Croll 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.