Stephane SINGIER

So for me, already, the CCIs, the cultural and creative industries, it covers 11 sectors which are very vast. So obviously, we all know cinema, television or video games, but it also covers everything related to museums, live and recorded shows, fashion, architecture, photography… It is a very vast sector which is extremely employer since in France, on the study retained, one is with more than 1 million three employees. You really always have to keep in mind, for example, the automobile sector opposite, the automobile sector, that’s 400,000 people. It should be understood that the cultural industries, today, in France, it is more than three times the automobile sector. So it really is a very important element of our economy and one that is often underestimated. So training in this sector must be really well thought out, it must be able to be constantly updated and we must have very high level training. Well, I think that’s a good introduction to find out why a Master’s degree in “Creative Media” is relevant. We will need more and more trained staff and therefore we must also develop this training and Angoulême, with its many schools, its entire ecosystem around animation is a privileged place with very high level schools.

So I think we’re going to position ourselves in a few years, we’re going to say at least three or four years since it takes a cycle to train people, so the best thing is all the same to know what we need will need when they leave.
I think that for that, for all training, not just in the media sector, for that matter, you really have to ask yourself the question of “what will the students have to do when they leave the world of work? And so, how will the services and also the tools for creating creations have evolved?

So, these skills, they will have to be multiple. So, probably formations that will be able to adapt to different types of profiles. Today, in the creation of complete, populated virtual universes, for the cinema, for the audiovisual sector, for video games as well, all this content includes sound creation, animation and visual effects. And then real time with the arrival of virtual reality, augmented reality, which are sectors that will become more and more present in the years to come. So, obviously, training in the creative media sector must take all of these aspects into account. Because a number of these tools are tools that are common to all of these sectors.

So what skills should students have? So, I would say that there is knowledge, in particular to master the history of art, the history of these techniques, know-how, skills in creative terms, and then a good inventiveness in the ability to designing content and also a good ability to produce it. Probably all the students will not be able to acquire all of this set. We will come back a little further in detail.
But all of these skills will at least need to be addressed during training. It is necessary that the pupils have the knowledge, therefore not obligatorily a good knowledge to make on the technical control of the whole of the tools. But it is necessary at least to have a general vision which makes it possible to know where one is registered in the whole of the creative processes using the numerical tools.

If we ask ourselves the question, at the time of a diploma, at the time of the end of the training, what are the knowledge, the mastery that a student must have. I think we can’t demand, especially with the complexity of the technologies that are in place, we can’t demand mastery of all the technical building blocks.

We will have to make choices and probably we will need a certain number of profiles, but I would say mainly two families of profiles. On the one hand, the mastery of a creative work, we will rather say a realization side and therefore there, of a complete creative work which can be pre-calculated as well as real time, for its realization, it is obviously necessary to have the knowledge, I am not saying the ability to implement them, but at least the ability to direct them, of a certain number of creative techniques. And so, it is necessary to have the knowledge of these creative techniques, but not necessarily the complete technical mastery of the creative tools.

And that, you have to understand, we have a creative profile, he must know what the stages of creation are, but not necessarily master all the software and tools or technologies or processes to get there.

It will rather be the second family of profiles, which will be high-level technical skills. And there, we are going to need profiles who master one or more techniques in all their complexity, but with knowledge of the entire creative process, to know where the creative brick is placed, but of these creative bricks of which they have the charged. And obviously, we are no longer in unique tools, so there must be a skill to be able to adapt. Not only to the evolutions of these tools, but also to other tools which would be, for example, open source tools and which achieve the same creative goal. For is very clear if someone masters Maya, he must know how to master Blender, if he masters Photoshop, he must know how to master Gimp, and what is very important is to master the creative process and not only the place of functions in an interface, we are there, to fully master a creative process and to be able to adapt to different tools that have the same purpose.

These techniques and these processes for creating digital content, media are in perpetual evolution and have been in perpetual evolution for 30 years and will be still more and more.

You have at one time people who believed in “that’s it, digital has arrived, we’re going to stabilize”, no, not at all, we realize on the contrary that things are accelerating and that finally, now, we is going to have tools where artificial intelligence is going to get into it. Besides, artificial intelligence is probably one of the most important things to take into account.

15-20 years ago, to create textures on a 3D model, you had a graphic designer who spent hours creating textures, almost pixel-perfect. Today, we work more like that, today, you have tools that use artificial intelligence to have algorithms that are at the service of creativity. And so, you don’t need to master, for example, the algorithm because there are interfaces, user interfaces that allow you to interact, without even having mastery of the algorithm behind it. Thinking that, I’m thinking of Allegorithmic® (bought by Adobe under the name Substance® editor’s note.), but you’ll have it in a lot of sectors. So we have AI in crowd management, for example with Golaem®, we have it in automated editing with a company called Aive®. You will have it in the creation of animations with a company like Kinetix®, which will allow, from video recordings, to make animated characters. So, we agree, we are not in Disney-type animation, but filters could very well make cartoon-type animation, that is to say elasticity effects , tremors, anticipation, there will be interfaces that will allow you to add them. So it’s going to be a new way of working, and probably much more productive, and therefore lowering costs.

And today, we precisely need skills at affordable costs. Because from the moment we multiply the content, since we are in creative processes that are based on economic rules, and we go to products where, ultimately, we have to spend less time to produce them . An animator at Disney, he produces roughly 3.5 seconds of character animation per week. I don’t think that the majority of students who leave training today are in this type of ratio and probably in 4-5 years from now, per week, we will have at least one minute to produce. Today, we are already in a ratio of at least 4-5 times what is required of a person who works at Disney, so be careful to target the mastery of tools and creative process according to the markets. for whom it is intended.

Also the arrival of real time, today, it starts in the processes, for example, to make series or animated film, we are starting to be able to use creation tools in real time. I am thinking in particular of what is around “Unreal Engine”, so we have to take into account the arrival of these new tools in training, perhaps even set up challenges between students.

So I could add other things is that new types of content will develop in an extremely important way. It’s everything that revolves around virtual universes, virtual worlds. In fact, the meta-universes, the meta-universes for a few years, we call them metaverses, it will take a very important place. Today you have big players like Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. investing heavily in it, but you also have smaller companies.

I am thinking for example of Epic Games, they have just raised a billion dollars to create their metaverse. A billion dollars! And they found the funders to do that! And what is a metaverse, it’s not only a universe, a very complex universe, it can include cities, entire cities, the digital twins of cities, but it can include the inhabitants , the rules of internal movement and finally everything that will revolve around digital doubles, the famous digital twins. The digital twins can be your person, your bodily envelope, but also the interior and it will be used in medicine, where all the examinations that will be done to you, we will be able to integrate them and roughly speaking, you will have attached to your person, a bit like “BIM” (Building Information Model) in the real estate sector. And so, we will be able to manage your digital avatar over time and see its evolution. But you have it, as I was saying, in the city, therefore, with all the issues of city management, building management, but also being able to perform a certain number of tasks there, or the equivalent of the “apps” that today we have on the mobile phone to perform such and such a function, we will have apps that will use what I would call “cloud AR”, that is to say the cloud as we knows him today, but on augmented reality. And so, you will be able to access the digital twin of the universe you will be in with loads of functions.

So, I go to my city, I see the store that I like and I want to find its digital twin.

• I can go inside
• I can go see what they have on the shelves
• I can try something virtually and I can buy it.

So, that, these are developments after ten years and so it’s very important to tell ourselves that the young people we train today, they will certainly find themselves participating in their creation because it will be huge markets, let’s say well beyond the financial volumes today, of what we find on cinema or television or video games.
It’s all of commerce, the whole of the economy is going to be based on metaverses, and so that’s why I was telling you, there’s going to be a lot of expectation from employers to have people trained , and so during the training, we will be in a pivotal period where we will be able to show mainly content that will be linear, so films, series, but explaining to young people that ultimately, they will be in content which will be real time and which must therefore be able to be played quickly and seen in augmented reality. So that means, for example, using very light textures. If you’re using very light textures, that means it’s just the algorithm, in fact, that you associate with the modem. And I will give as an example, what is done today on “Unreal Engine 5”. You have a cinematic quality that is calculated in real time. And that, today, you have it, let’s say, for people who are super geeks, who have equipped themselves with technical equipment which is a bit expensive, but in 5 years, the basic game consoles , basic computers, telephones, will be able to display this in real time. And so, that means that we shouldn’t ask ourselves today the question of “Ah, but it may be a little complicated to calculate”, yes, but if we train people at 4-5 years old, when they are on the job market, that’s it, these calculations can be done and above all, you will have new generations (of systems editor’s note.), especially on quantum computers which will no longer pose any problems on how to calculate this , so what we knew 30 years ago when you wanted to calculate a nice, correct image, roughly speaking, it was always 1 hour depending on the evolution of augmented graphics cards. But an image always lasts an hour, because it is made more complex in terms of level of detail, polygons, quality of textures, quality of lighting. And there, there is a big break. That’s it, now, graphics cards, graphics processors, that can do calculations with ray tracing (raytracing editor’s note.), that is to say with all the reflections in real time. So what you can do before higher, that is today, your computer, your phone already knows how to do it.

And then, you are going to have an increase in the quality of the level of these images because today, we are talking about 4K, but we will be in 8K. We will probably be on augmented reality devices with retinal projection, that is to say that it will perhaps be just simple lenses or small projectors that we will have in the glasses and not at all, helmets huge. We are going to move towards technological developments which will need creative capacities to make extremely detailed content, hyperrealistic end, it is not necessarily hyperrealistic, in the sense of our world, of our universe, of reproduction, of what exists . It can also be, by being very inventive, inventing dream worlds, worlds… after that it depends on the types of content we want to make, but we will be able to produce immersive content in particular that can be adapt to any type of universe.

I already spoke about it earlier, I said AI and AI and again AI, that, we can only see the beginning of it and probably that will make the task easier.

So, I want to say one thing in the creative sector, there are a lot of people who say “I don’t want the computer to create for me, creation must be reserved for humans” so no, don’t see it that way, it’s a bad approach. It’s artificial intelligence will allow you to automate a number of tasks. This means that from the moment you show it how to do it, with “deep learning”, the computer will be able to do it the same way as you if you would have done it without. He will be able to make you proposals. So, it’s not because the computer is going to suggest to you, you can ask it “hey, I want to prioritize such and such a thing or such a function or such a path”, you’re going to give it orders and it’s going to suggest you, it’s going to propose to you, if we follow such a characteristic, we obtain such a result. And then finally, he will present you with 4, 5, 10, 20 ways of seeing a sequence that you would have had to build, and the creative retains control since it is he who will make the choice of what he wants keep. Artificial intelligence is just going to allow you to move forward faster by maximizing your creative abilities and minimizing the fatigue associated with repetitive tasks, you have to see it like that and above all not to say to yourself I don’t want the computer thinks for me. It’s not the right question and it’s not the right approach.

So here’s artificial intelligence, real time too, it’s going to really make big changes, the graphic quality earlier I was talking to you about “Unreal Engine 5” it will be very interesting to see in 3, 4, 5 years , where we will be. We’re probably going to move towards more and more complex and realistic things and you’ll be able to find all that in a connected and immersive way, so the networks, the metaverses, what I mentioned to you earlier, you’ll also be able to meet your friends, your professional relations, everyone will be able to find themselves in these virtual spaces. So there are obviously all the interaction rules that will have to be fully developed.

And I like it because we did a production at ZA (Productions editor’s note), maybe twenty years ago. I like to see it in the sense of “Cosmogonies”. The cosmogony, in fact, is a double world. And in France, we were very inventive on this because I’m just reminding you of “the Second World”, it’s something that had been imagined in the mid-90s, in particular at Canal+, using projects from Cryo (Interactive editor’s note.) by Philippe Ulrich, who was later used to make “Second Life”. So, actually, there’s already a whole story around that. Except that at the time, there were no storage capacities and no network capacities, they did not have graphic capacities, he did not have artificial intelligence. In fact, roughly speaking, we already wanted to do it, but without having any technological element at the height to be able to control them. So there, these are things that will emerge and we must start now to train the young people who will become those who will create this content.

Me, I’m in a competitiveness cluster, so in fact the type of profiles that are in the cluster, we’re not really about creative media designers. On the other hand, a thousand structures were brought together, including more than 750 start-ups. But I don’t know, we don’t have more than one out of two animation studios in France that is a member of CAP. Obviously, even if Cap Digital does not use this type of profile, we are in a network where employment has developed extremely. I’m just recalling the latest figures from the RAF (Rencontres Animation Formation), we can see that we’ve had almost a thousand jobs created in the sector in the space of one or two years. So that’s where we see that the animation sector for twenty years each year creates new jobs. I just take that of animation, but if we look at video games, and in particular the turnover of video games, it is phenomenal. Obviously, these sectors employ them. But as I told you earlier, probably a good part of these jobs will not be in these ICC sectors at the start, but in other industrial sectors which set up metaverses. You have to understand, tomorrow you will have the digital twin of your car, you will know how to fix it yourself because you will access the database and you will be guided in augmented reality. But you will find it in all the elements of your life and you will have to create its contents and therefore the posts. I am absolutely not worried about “will there be work in 5 years or in 10 years or in 20 years”? On the contrary, it is probably the job profiles that will benefit from the greatest evolution in terms of supply in the years to come.

My biggest suggestion is that we will have to be really attentive to very recent technical developments because, obviously, all new professions will be based on these developments. And so, you have to be able, even if companies don’t use them yet, to train young people because they will leave three or two years later and the company that will employ them will want to have skills.

So, I will give you an example, for example the company Golaem® which is based in Rennes. It sells its licenses, it makes crowd animation software to populate virtual universes and so it can be found in film backgrounds, in The Lord of the Rings or in Game of Thrones or in video games. These are major studios, for example, you have these tools at Dreamworks, it is moreover one of the leading companies in the world on this subject, they cover a lot of studios, but there is no training in the schools. That is to be taken into account, it is necessary somewhere that even if it is useless, that all the students are trained in tools, it is still necessary that the high-end tools, there are some- ones trained. So, you have to imagine that there could be an option where each student, for example, can for a year work on a month, a specific tool that is on a list to have, a few need skills. Because today, I see job offers where, for example, at Mac Guff, we are looking for people who are hairdressers or capable of doing hair. Well, they’re not real hairdressers, they’re people who have to know how to use digital tools to make the fur of all the little critters, to see the hair of humans that we want to be more and more realistic. And as these are very complex techniques, we are looking for people, they have trouble finding them, but also for crowd animation. And suddenly, what did Golaem®, Golaem® do to create “Golaem Académie”. They begin to train future skills on network tools.

And there, the schools, you really have to realize that there is a transformation, you have to be able to have partnerships on complex tools. Because you are not necessarily going to have teachers who will master them, there may need to be some kind of channel dedicated to schools to have a flow that allows students, during their training, to to learn something complex and specific, but for a short period of time. It is perhaps less than a week, it is within the framework of an exercise or within the framework of a graduation film to know how to master such and such a tool. But there will be a high expectation. For very specific tools that cannot be learned on a massive scale in schools. We have to invent a new way of knowing how we transmit, how we initiate. Because young people must already want to use these tools, they must at some point have a sort of overview of all these future generations of tools, and say to themselves “which one is which are the two that I find extremely interesting and on which I need to be competent later”? And there, you have to invent a model, a little à la carte and probably to be developed with the editors of these very sophisticated tools, on how you do the initial training.

And behind this, there is also the question of continuing education, which means that the tools evolve so quickly. There are generations of 1 or 2 years 3 years, how to keep young people at the forefront. These training courses on interactive media must be open to being able, for example every year, to import the upgrade of standard tools over a week. You have to find leads because this fact, I think it is the responsibility of this type of training to provide after-sales service and provide after-sales service in time. Because companies are not going to confine themselves to version 7 or 8 and therefore they evolve over time. And when you have things that are going more and more, for example integrating artificial intelligence or things like that, well, you won’t necessarily be able to learn everything by yourself. And so, here it is, schools need to ask themselves the question in parallel with initial training. How do I maintain competence over time on the new generations of licenses that arrive?