“Our priority is to create our experiences for a general audience in cultural venues” – Arnaud Desjardins (Femme Fatale Studio)

From web creation to immersive experiences, Femme Fatale Studio is a collective of French artists and developers built around a common passion for images and digital. Focus on this young creative studio with its co-founder Arnaud Desjardins, on the occasion of the release this year of DREAM BUILDERS (THE CENOTAPH OF NEWTON), distributed by Diversion cinema.

Femme Fatale, an experience born of the web

Arnaud Desjardins – Femme Fatale (Paris-based) was initially created around purely web projects, more as a group of artists and freelance talents willing to help each other. Since then, we have moved towards more elaborate XR experiences, notably through a collaboration with the business collective Artisans d’idées (link), and more specifically the production company mardi8 in Marseille, which allowed us to work on projects around museums or institutions. For example, we have elaborated all the interactive devices present in the National Museum of Norway (Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo), as well as for a museum under construction in the Middle East – or other white label projects for other agencies.

A. D. – The studio is in a dynamic of XR production for the cultural and heritage sector. This is the DNA of Femme Fatale when we created it. I personally worked on the creation of 360° virtual tours of heritage sites, such as the Lascaux Cave, the Palais Royal in Paris, a Roman village or the famous Fort Boyard. Experiences realized at the time in Flash! These past experiences have allowed us to have an increased knowledge of the universe of museums and institutions, especially with this approach of innovation and digital.

A. D. – Our approach is one of mediation above all. When we talk to an exhibition curator or programmer, we have to understand his or her approach, enhance it through our content, and script it for an audience. The interest of the new digital media is to enter into the material and offer a new look, a new reading. This is notably the case for the Mona Lisa exhibition currently on display at the Marseille Bourse de Commerce. It is a project co-produced by the Louvre Museum and the RMN-GP (Grand Palais Immersif), and supervised by the Artisans d’Idées teams (who are co-operators).

A. D. – In addition to our own projects, we are also service providers for exhibitions or audiovisual production companies (for dressing, motion design…). Our ambition today is to propose our own contents, to defend projects that are close to our heart. The two activities are perfectly balanced. Next to us, there are several creative studios that excel in our sector. We can think of Emissive, which had already proposed a VR experience around the Mona Lisa, but also Eternelle Notre-Dame more recently. We are seeing the arrival of events for the general public that are accelerating the adoption of XR and the exploration of heritage, and this is very positive for everyone.

2022: DREAM BUILDERS in virtual reality

A. D. – This year we finalized our first VR experience, DREAM BUILDERS, which premiered in Milan in April. It is the pilot of a more ambitious series, which aims to be presented in museums concerned with the theme of architecture. This project proposes to stage places or buildings never built, and represent them in virtual reality. Architectural utopias, in short! The first episode focuses on the NEWTON CENOTAPH, designed by Etienne-Louis Boullée in 1784, original by its shape and its gigantism. It is one of the first monuments designed as a tribute to a scientist.

A. D. – VR allows a capacity of wonder for this type of subject. In this case, a model of the Cenotaph exists, but it is tiny. The monument itself is a pure gesture of architecture that was not intended to exist. We allow the viewer to visit it in virtual reality, as if it were real! We use VR to transport our audience, and transform the environment. We can fly, enter a black hole… It is a sensitive, individual journey, which goes beyond a simple visit. We think about the possibilities of a real dreamed utopia, an imaginary, an encounter with artists.

A. D. – DREAM BUILDERS has an artistic and philosophical ambition. It is not a course in architecture. In any case, the buildings never existed! We can therefore allow ourselves some liberties, not respecting to the millimeter the imagined places. We look at the collective intangible heritage, and we explore it by putting our capacity for mediation, creativity and poetry back at the heart of the project. And this is what can interest cultural institutions: reinventing our approach to such subjects.

Next, LITTLE NEMO ?

A. D. – LITTLE NEMO is a project 100% designed for platforms. This time we want to focus on fiction and the general public, with an international scope. There is an internal R&D challenge, but also – like everyone else – to find sustainable distribution solutions. We have to produce with broadcasting in mind, which is already a model in the audiovisual and video game industries. It’s also a work that particularly touches me, one of my favorite books when I was younger.

A. D. – Recently, we were lucky enough to participate in the Martell residency in Cognac (created by the Fondation d’Entreprise Martell and the Pôle Magelis in Angoulême), which allowed us to finalize the writing of the project and start the development phase. We rarely have time to sit down and write about this type of project. The DNA of Femme Fatale is above all to create and make universes. We are makers. These few weeks in the company of our mentor, Gilles Alvarez from the Biennale Némo, allowed me to take the necessary time to write, and to refine my intentions of realization as well as the cutting of the story. I hope to soon prototype the first phase of the project, and continue to explore the story without any urgency.