A new milestone for Séquences Éphémères

Séquences Éphémères has reached a new milestone. On Tuesday 13 October 2026, at 9.10 pm, France 2 broadcast “La grande histoire de la Marine”, the flagship documentary marking 400 years of the French Navy. In the end credits, among the 3D animation supervisors, is a name from Martinique: Georges-Emmanuel Arnaud, for SOLIBO Studio — the creative branch of Séquences Éphémères.

It is SOLIBO Studio’s biggest production to date, and a major step for the project as a whole. To understand what it means, we need to go back to the original idea.

Anisotropie, Séquences Éphémères, SOLIBO Studio

It all starts with the Anisotropie association. Anisotropie runs Séquences Éphémères, the structuring project that brought a motion capture system to Martinique. From the outset, Séquences Éphémères was not conceived as just a technical tool, but around three branches that feed one another:

• Research — building archives of movement. Keeping a record of gestures, dances and bodily know-how, so they can be studied, passed on and revisited.
• The health of the body in motion — understanding how we move, at work, in sport, in daily life, in order to prevent injury, support people and care for them better.
• Creation — that is SOLIBO Studio. Not a side activity, but the economic support for the other two branches. The commissions we take on pay for the licences, the upkeep of the equipment, the technical watch and the new acquisitions. They let the research continue, and the commitment to health last.

SOLIBO Studio is, in other words, an initiative of Séquences Éphémères: creating so that research and health work can continue. That is why these credits matter well beyond the studio itself — every commission delivered moves the whole project forward.

2025: a launch, and a commission straight away

2025 was the year Séquences Éphémères truly got under way, made possible by the support of the Direction des Affaires Culturelles de Martinique. Through its investment support, the studio acquired Xsens suits, Manus gloves and the software that goes with them — state-of-the-art equipment, based on our own island.

And we did not wait to put it to work. We started straight away with a virtual reality project: a commission, in Martinique, centred on the Habitation Rimbaud. That first year also brought residencies, captures in the studio and on location, and a talk on inclusion at work — all stages told in this journal.

2026: 400 years of the Navy, on France 2

In October 1626, driven by Richelieu, France established a permanent state navy. Four centuries later, France Télévisions marked the anniversary with a major prime-time documentary.

“La grande histoire de la Marine” is a film by Herlé Jouon, from an original idea by Guillaume Pérès, produced by Antipode and presented by Julian Bugier. It opens in the present, in the middle of the Orion 2026 exercise, aboard the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, a supply ship and a nuclear ballistic missile submarine. Then it travels back in time: the flotilla on the Grand Canal at Versailles, the Rochefort arsenal, the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781, the arrival of steam and ironclads in the nineteenth century.

To bring those eras back to life, the film relies on 3D reconstructions. That is where animation comes in — and where we played our part.

Supervising the 3D animation, alongside Armada Studios

The documentary’s 3D animation is by Armada Studios, a Paris studio specialising in digitising the real world — LiDAR scanning, photogrammetry, digital twins — for film, advertising, video games and heritage. A team whose craft is precisely to bring the real world into computer-generated images.

The 3D animation was supervised by three people: Jérôme Battistelli, co-founder of Armada Studios, Maxime Mirande, and Georges-Emmanuel Arnaud, art director of Anisotropie, for SOLIBO Studio and Séquences Éphémères.

The end credits of “La grande histoire de la Marine”. 3D animation: Armada Studios. 3D animation supervisors: Jérôme Battistelli, Maxime Mirande, Georges-Emmanuel Arnaud.

Supervising animation means keeping an eye on what makes an image hold together: the truth of a gesture, the weight of a body, the rhythm of a scene. That is exactly what we work on every day in the studio, suit on, watching how a body moves and what it says. Bringing that eye to a national programme proves that what we are building in Martinique has value far beyond our island.

A reconstruction from the documentary. As the on-screen caption states, these images combine artificial intelligence and 3D.

Thank you to Armada Studios and Jérôme Battistelli for their trust, to Maxime Mirande for the shared work, and to the whole team at Antipode and France Télévisions.

A gift for Martinique

As the year draws to a close, this is a wonderful gift. For us, of course — and, we hope, for Martinique.

Because those credits say something simple and powerful: talent from our territory can conceive a project, shape it and deliver it to the standard of a national broadcaster. And because the result can reach as many people as possible — the whole of France and, beyond it, the entire French-speaking world.

For a long time, this kind of work meant leaving. What we are building with Séquences Éphémères is the opposite: a place where you can train, experiment, produce and reach outwards from Martinique.

Next port of call: Clermont-Ferrand

And it does not stop there. In February 2027, we are heading to the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, at the Short Film Market, for a week of motion capture workshops. A week to share what we know, let people try it, meet directors, and show what motion capture can bring to the films of tomorrow.

The adventure continues.

Thank you

We are happy, and deeply grateful.

Thank you to the Direction des Affaires Culturelles de Martinique, without whom none of this would have started. Thank you to all our partners, in Martinique and beyond. And thank you to everyone who believed in this crazy idea:

doing motion capture in Martinique, to reach the whole world.

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“La grande histoire de la Marine” is available to watch again on france.tv. See all our work on the SOLIBO Studio references page (in French).