Cyber Group Delivers Big Fun & Tech Innovation with Giganto Club

Raphaelle Mathieu, senior VP of sales, acquisitions and new media at Cyber Group Studios, talks to TV Kids about using the funding from its Epic MegaGrant to accelerate its ability to create immersive entertainment experiences and further its mission to deliver film-quality content and interactive games.

“It means an incredible acknowledgment of the hard work of our teams for the last 18 months, and more specifically, during this last Covid-19 year,” says Raphaelle Mathieu, senior VP of sales, acquisitions and new media at Cyber Group Studios. “It means we are benefitting from the support of their teams and work even more in a close relationship with them to optimize our pipeline and to be able to use the technology soon for traditional animation that will not be so traditional anymore thanks to this amazing input.”

The MegaGrant bolsters the company’s effort to launch a new virtual production pipeline, which includes an Unreal Engine-powered real-time rendering and motion capture studio, located in Roubaix, France.

“The new studio in Roubaix will be our main pipeline for the real-time animation content and shootings,” Mathieu says. “We will need actors to act the scenes, and this completely changes the work of a director and the production. It will help us to speed up the production process and to create content with an incredible fluidity of motion for the characters. Soon, we will be able to implement a part of this technology for our biggest series in development, such as Monster in My Pocket or Alex Player, for example, which we presented during Cartoon Forum.”

The new studio will host a state-of-the-art virtual production, real-time rendering and hybrid magnetic/optical motion capture studio. “The aim is to be able to create unique content in a very limited time frame to enrich the IP and the brand we have developed,” Mathieu says.

Giganto Club marks Cyber Group’s first 100 percent digital-native and 100 percent real-time animation series. This dinosaur adventure expands on the success of the company’s animated series Gigantosaurus. Each episode of Giganto Club will present fascinating facts about the Cretaceous period and provide interesting comparisons to today’s world. The series will feature breathtaking landscapes and locations and is hosted by real-time animated dinos that engage viewers with games, songs and themed segments. “Kids will relate to the series thanks to its original content and also because it will enrich the [Gigantosaurus] universe they love,” Mathieu says.

The plan is to make the high-quality Giganto Club content available on a variety of platforms, depending on the different partnerships that Cyber Group enters into on a territory-by-territory basis.

“Giganto Club is definitely the first of its kind, and we will certainly develop other digital-native content with the technology and other IPs,” says Mathieu. “Frankly, today, the possibilities are huge, and the initial response from the market is really incredible, so it is only the beginning. The real-time process allows for a lot of new possibilities, including the potential for live performances. A whole new world of possibilities is coming up and enriching our content!”