A revived production of Le Roi Soleil, the French musical telling the story of Louis XIV’s life, is currently touring Paris and France in 2025 and 2026 with a visual infrastructure built around Absen LED screens, Epson 20,000-lumen projectors and SMODE media servers. The show was first produced 20 years ago.
Video accounts for around 80 percent of the production’s stage scenery, with the SMODE platform handling live media playback and compositing across a system combining large-format LED screens, projection mapping and mobile video elements. Two primary servers run in Smode-Net for synchronised playback, with two additional machines providing redundancy. The servers are controlled via a GrandMA console using sACN, keeping the video system synchronised with lighting and stage automation.
The LED infrastructure centres on an 18 x 8m Absen LS3.9 Pro LED wall that can split in two to allow scenic elements to pass through, flanked by two transparent LST3.9 LED screens measuring 8 x 7m each. Six wireless LED towers – each 6.5m high by 2m wide and mounted on battery-powered bases – move around the stage throughout the performance. Six Epson 20,000-lumen projectors map visuals onto a stage frame measuring 28m wide by nearly 10m high.
Visual content was developed by Studio A+E, a creative studio specialising in video design for opera, theatre and live performance.
Tom Valadoux Midol, SMODE operator on the production, said: “SMODE manages all the live media playback, which makes up 80 percent of the show’s scenery. It also played a major role during pre-production, allowing us to encode modifications and the artistic team’s various requests in real time, and we were able to do so on two machines simultaneously.”
Valadoux Midol added: “The compositing engine was extremely useful on this project, as most of the media was composited directly in SMODE using assets provided under the artistic director’s guidance. During the pre-production period, there was a significant amount of real-time creation – SMODE allowed us to present different scenic and animation options to the artistic team and to respond to their requests almost instantly.”
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