A world premiere!

Yuga, le film, a completely immersive experience presented in the Ambiosphère L’Oréal

Presented for the entire duration of the Festival. Free admission.

Montreal, Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - The MONTREAL HIGH LIGHTS Festival is especially proud to invite Montrealers and their guests to discover one of the wonders of this 11th edition: Yuga, le film, a spectacular 14-minute animated digital project that plunges the viewer into an utterly immersive experience, revealing nothing less than the history of the universe! Entirely conceived and created in Montreal by Space&Dream and co-produced with the MONTREAL HIGH LIGHTS Festival, thanks to the support of L’Oréal, the Partenariat du Quartier des spectacles, Industry Canada and the ministère du Tourisme, Yuga is a world premiere presented as part of the BMO Bank of Montreal Celebration of Light, in the incredible Ambiosphère L’Oréal on the Place des Festivals… and admission is free for the duration of the Festival!

Intriguing and inviting, it stands in L’Espace L’Oréal on the Place des Festivals, in the heart of the Quartier des spectacles: the Ambiosphère L’Oréal, an enormous 21-metre white sphere large enough to accommodate 300 to 400 people at a time. And once inside? A simple-looking opaque inner wall, a 360º screen that transforms the sphere into a one-of-a-kind cinema… because once these six synchronized high-performance projectors whirr into action, once the walls are transformed by images, the viewer will swear that the surface has disappeared, replaced by eye-popping images of the universe! Add in ambiophonic sound, and you’ve got a waking dream, an exciting 14-minute journey revealing the history of the universe… in an unforgettable immersive experience!

In Hindu philosophy, yuga refers to an era within a cycle of four ages in the repeating creation and destruction of the universe. Upon entering the Ambiosphère L’Oréal, transformed into a time machine, the spectator is whisked away on a unique journey from the last moments of Earth to the birth of the universe. Spectacular!

Space&Dream

Founded in 2007, Space&Dream is powered by a passion for computer science and the digital visual arts. Space & Dream fuses virtual reality, video game and 3D animation film technologies to create never-before-seen projection experiences. The young award-winning enterprise already counts among its clients the Montréal Science Centre, The EX in Toronto, Zumba, and Virgin Galactic, for whom they created an immersive presentation in the Louis Vuitton store in Paris.

Guillaume Langlois, director of Yuga, le film, is also the president-founder of Space&Dream. In 2007, he and Luc Courchesne of the Société des Arts Technologiques won the OCTAS prize for excellence in digital arts. He has created this unprecedented project with an unparalleled team including music composer and sound designer Edmund Eagan, of the Twelfth Root studio, recipient of a number of SOCAN awards for his work in Canadian film and TV, as well as Yuga co-director and 3D artistic director Julien Abril.

Hydra software…

The magic of Yuga exists thanks to the immersive projection technology Hydra, another innovation of the Space&Dream studio, allowing creators to combine images from a number of projectors in order to cover the entire interior surface of the Ambiosphère, transforming it into an immersive spherical screen with the spectator at its heart. Hydra works to correct and synchronize the different images from the video projectors in order to create an unbroken image on any surface.

… and the expertise behind the Ambiosphère L’Oréal

The inflatable Ambiosphère was created by Aérolande, conceived by Pierre Jutras, the man behind the inflatable roof that amazed fans of the Festival Internationlal de Jazz de Montréal during the ’80s!

Yuga, le film is presented as part of the Festival’s free outdoor program, the BMO Bank of Montreal Celebration of Light, in l’Espace L’Oréal on the Place des Festivals: it’s free of charge every day (off on Sunday and Monday), on the hour and half-hour, from noon to 9 p.m. (until 3 a.m. during the Nuit blanche).

The MONTREAL HIGH LIGHTS Festival thanks L’Oréal and the Partenariat du Quartier des spectacles, as well as its public partners, especially Industry Canada and the ministère du Tourisme for the financial support that makes this extraordinary event possible.

The 11th edition of the MONTREAL HIGH LIGHTS Festival will be held from Thursday, February 18 to Sunday, February 28, 2010. See you there!

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