Bretons crowd into Game of Thrones

The six staff at Golaem in Rennes created digital crowds for Independence Day: Resurgence, Chocolat and Game of Thrones with easy-to-use software developed for SNCF and other firms at the city’s Irisa computer science lab. Co-founder Alexandre Pillon said meeting a French special effects studio in the US in 2010 led to them working together to digitally animate crowds. Named after Golem, the Jewish clay figure given life, Mr Pillon said the firm does the same – “animating 3D characters”. Seeing their work in Game of Thrones is “very satisfying” but he said that, like other TV viewers, they must wait until the episodeis screened to see it. “Sometimes we have to ask what they did because it gets hard to distinguish the ‘real’ actors from the digital ones made by our software!”
He added: “It has always been our goal to reach the ‘big time’, but we never thought it would happen so soon.”