Behind the Scenes of Macron’s Bastille Day in Apple Immersive Video With a Blackmagic Workflow

One of the more interesting things that immersive video can do is give you a unique POV on high-profile events, hence the use of a Blackmagic workflow to capture the Bastille Day 2025 celebrations from beside France's President Emmanuel Macron.

This is one of those big corporation/big government projects that screams prestige, big budgets, tourist dollars, and educational worthiness, if not massive audiences.

Parisian studio Immersive Flashback has produced a film looking at Paris' Bastille Day celebrations from the POV of being right beside France's President Macron as the ceremony sweeps from the Élysée Palace to the Place de la Concorde and down the Champs-Élysées in the command car.

The result is a project that gives audiences a perspective normally reserved only for heads of state when viewed in Apple Immersive on the Apple Vision Pro. Macron even serves as the narrator for the project, speaking directly to viewers and guiding them through the day.

“The concept was simple: to let the French experience Bastille Day as never before, right alongside the President,” says Director, Frank-David Cohen. “Apple Immersive Video set the format, and Blackmagic’s workflow made it practical to deliver. Together they allowed us to take viewers inside places normally off limits, as if teleported into the scene.

“The scene in the president’s office, right at the beginning of the film, drew us into an iconic place. We waited as a clock chimed, the door opened, and the President entered and spoke to us. That feeling of realism was something no other format could provide.”

Immersive Challenges

There were challenges in getting it all done. First, coordination with France Télévisions was essential so the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive rigs would not appear in the live broadcast seen by the TV audience. Second, the production just had to go with the flow.

“Previously immersive shoots meant staging carefully, because the workflows couldn’t handle surprises,” Cohen says. “At the Élysée, we had to move straight from office interiors into daylight with no time to adjust. With Blackmagic RAW we could keep rolling, knowing those transitions could be managed in post without breaking the workflow.”

Stabilization was also crucial to avoid motion sickness, particularly with a camera mounted on the presidential command car. “We trialed several techniques with early access to the vehicle on a military base,” Cohen said.

Audio was treated as part of the immersion; each camera carrying ambisonic recording to match the viewer’s perspective, supported by traditional microphones for voices or effects further away. “The camera became both our eyes and our ears,” Cohen said.

Post was completed in DaVinci Resolve Studio, with the final sound mix carried out by Studio 31dB, a team specializing in spatial audio. “Resolve’s integration meant we could handle everything in one place. Fairlight gave us spatial mixing at a level sometimes better than dedicated tools,” Cohen says.

Where to See It

Francophiles are going to be a bit disappointed here as the resulting Apple Immersive video project has a limited distribution. Having been first presented to the public during the European Heritage Days, it can be seen on Apple Vision Pro at the Maison Élysée.

If you can get to see it, it will provide a unique perspective on events, quite literally. But you can't help feeling that, at the beginning of Apple's investment in the Vision Pro and its supporting formats, it was hoping for a bit more mass market appeal for the technology.