Eric VIENNOT

Everything obviously depends on what you mean by “creative media”, but what you explained to me about it, what I understood from it, is that indeed, we can clearly see that there is a new trend fairly global that goes towards a type of content that mixes media, whether for a narrative purpose, whether for an educational purpose.
We see that there are more and more authors, creators who are doing projects that are very different from the way we worked before films, series, even games, a fortnight or so ago. a twenty years. So I follow this trend, perhaps having been one of its pioneers, precisely twenty years ago.

So I follow it with a lot of interest, but we see that it is very multiple, that it goes in lots of different directions. This is what makes it rich, but at the same time the difficulty for creators to follow and master its tools. We often confuse transmedia with a kind of accumulation of things and that’s a bit of a trap, a danger.

For it to be accessible to the general public, it is often necessary to master the tools, to master the way in which they can be activated, either separately or simultaneously without falling into a kind of gas factory. And so, I think that indeed, it is a discipline which deserves to be taught today in schools, art schools as well as audiovisual schools.

I’ll give you an example that was created and that I oversaw three years ago, which is a huge transmedia device that was created for the department of Aude, France. So it is a department which is very rich culturally since it contains a set of monuments, dating from the Middle Ages and which are very well-known abbeys, some of which are very well known such as the Frontfroide abbey near Narbonne. And then castles which are also very famous, such as the castle of Bergues or Quéribus, what we call the fortresses of vertigo because they are really located at the very top of the mountain, quite vertiginous. And then, of course, at the center of that, the city of Carcassonne, world famous for its ramparts and its castle. The department of Aude therefore asked us, four years ago, to think about a transmedia device or new media, as we prefer, which would not only attract tourists to the department, but above all to engage them to stay as long as possible. I recommended implementing game techniques, which look a bit like a mix between Pokémon Go, in situ games that we play in the various monuments of the department. And at the same time, the same game but which is playable remotely, which is a kind of collection game, what we call object crafting to compose objects that will be used by players to build a fortified village, which t is called a castrum, a village typical of the Middle Ages of this period. And the child, since it is precisely a question of engaging children, from a distance, whether in Paris, Strasbourg or even abroad, will be able to collect objects, objects which, by assembling, will allow him to build his castrum. It’s obviously inserted into a story with characters to make it all much more immersive and much more narrative, so it’s inserted into a story that will allow this child, through play, to understand the issues of this time, in particular this famous battle between the crusaders and the Cathars who were chased, even burned by the crusaders of this time.

So here we are, we created a fairly rich system which consisted of a game, an application, and this game, in particular, allowed children, when they returned to the city of Carcassonne, always allows because this game is always active, to encourage their parents to go to the castle, to complete their visit. And how do we do it? It’s simple, the child begins to play and then, there are principles of commitment that at some point make him want to continue. And to continue, he is obliged to go to certain monuments, that is to say that there are rare objects, objects like in Pokémon, rare objects which are only accessible in certain monuments and not in others. others, therefore who will invite the child and his parents to visit these different monuments. So, we can see that it’s a fairly complex narration that uses play, that uses photos, videos. Because there is also an application, I would say more classic, which is a tourist application. And so, all this is a device that represents, in my opinion, many projects in the years to come, cultural projects, artistic projects or tourist projects and even social projects. Things that will allow creators to communicate with a large audience, whether in museums, monuments or, why not, also everywhere in the street. The street itself becomes a playground.

Precisely his skills, they are multiple, I think it is necessary to first know the principles related to new media such as the Internet, social networks, even immersive media such as VR, augmented reality. It is clear that these are emerging media that will become popular and multiply in the years to come. So, you have to know all these media. You have to know what their specificities are, how they can complement each other in a certain way. I think it’s essential to also know the principles that come from video games because we can clearly see that video games are at the heart of a lot of these new media. We see that the game even today influences the narration of certain TV series, for example. So, you have to know some principles of game design. And then, above all, you have to understand how these objects are produced. We no longer produce today, as we produced twenty years ago or even ten years ago.
I think that we are really today in very iterative principles where we test, we must test, when we have a concept in our head right away, try to shape it from a prototype. And then, this prototype will iterate, we will test it with a target audience. We are in new production methods which seem to me to be totally distant from the way we produced films, some of which today produce films which are much more iterative and much more agile “processes” than we imagined. few years ago.

We are also, when we are author, creator, much more in a mode of collaborative work. It’s over, I think, the time of the author who decided everything as we had in the cinema, for example. We are dependent on technology, so we are much more in a collaborative working mode with other people and a dialogue which is essential between the technical professions. Basically, engineers, computer developers, and then more artistic professions such as storytelling, audiovisual production or game design, for example.

It’s always a difficult exercise to predict the future, but we can still start from weak signals, as they say. In particular weak signals that appeared a few years ago. I was talking about Pokémon Go, we can clearly see that the media, with the explosion of the mobile phone. We have really moved on to mobile content with the possibility, thanks to mobiles, of being able to get out of your home, to be able to get out of traditional screens, which were TV and cinema screens, to go to different places. With geolocation, with the possibility of using augmented reality, with the possibility of being able to mix Internet content and games, that has already appeared, but I think it will become more and more popular and with the arrival of 5G which will perhaps make it possible to have, in addition to this content that existed previously, even more of an immersive dimension with, why not, the possibility of using VR, in situ with the possibility of having videos much easier, etc.

We see that a big trend is to bring the user, the player, outside his home, to various places.

The second trend is indeed VR. We see that gradually, VR is starting to interest the general public. So, is it precisely thanks to these mobile technologies, which will evolve towards more and more power, that we will be able to reach the general public? That’s a question. Here. Basically, afterwards, there would be plenty of other subjects that we could address in a more distant horizon, which are artificial intelligence. Things that will obviously change video games and media in general considerably. Because we even see that today, artificial intelligence is a writing aid. We see musicians creating music with AIs. We see more and more images created with AIs, even films. So we see that AI is going to be, in the years to come, a technology that is going to play a considerable role in the way we create content and how we use content.

I can clearly see, by teaching at the INA for example or at the ENJMIN, a generation of people who were born with these new media, for whom the Internet is a medium as natural as for us, television or books were ours era. So we can see that these young people are intuitively familiar with these new media, especially social networks. But sometimes they think they know them and in fact they don’t necessarily have a critical use, that is to say they are subjected to them more than they manage to know them.

Right now, I’m developing a project around a newsletter. I try to create a community. I am independent, I still have a company and it could indeed be a person who would know how to designate a community. We haven’t talked about it, but a crowdfunding project, the way of doing both communication and at the same time developing a project, those are profiles that, in my opinion, are going to be highly sought after in the coming years. That is to say, both people who are in digital communication, in social networks and at the same time, in the ability to create content that interacts with all these media.

I don’t know Mexico, but I think it’s a country that is geared towards tourism due to its cultural past. I think that there is content to be created around this historical heritage, while bringing interactive content, we have just talked about it, are rich in innovations for an audience who could come and visit sites or who are interested also remotely. Because we can see that tourism will also be impacted by the Covid crisis. So there are also ways to bring monuments to life through these new media, which are VR, for example, which would allow you to visit a Mayan pyramid remotely or to be able to tell stories around this heritage. It’s an idea like any other, but it’s the first idea that comes to me.