”History is a great subject for immersive stories” – Sebastien Tixador (11.11.18)

A few minutes before the suspension of fighting in World War on November 11, 1918, soldiers have to face a series of decisions.

Sebastien Tixador – I was born in the south of France and went to Brussel for studies. I worked on many films short movies and feature, until i joined Les Films de La récré. For 4 years we put together many projects including two feature, a documentary and a short movie. I discovered the immersive industry through video-games , and i was totally amazed by the possibilities of such a technologie. i naturally wanted to adapt it to the movie industry.

11.11.18 and the historical challenge

S. T. – 11.11.18 is a cross media project, it started in January 2018 when a group of friends made a short movie about WWI. The movie was a POV movie and a long shot. The result was good so we decided to go further, and made a feature. And obviously a VR Experience. So we split and i focused on the VR Project that we co-directed with Django Schrevens. We didn’t use a crowdfounding plateform to finance the project.

S. T. – The hardest part of the shooting was to manage the interactivity, in 11.11.18 the viewers will be able to make choices that have impact on the story. During the shooting we had to think about this all the time the position of the actors, the time to give to make choices, and of curse shooting the same séquence but with different consequences. Since it has never been done before we had no model to work on so we had to invent everything, hard work especially for the script-girl.

The future of interactive VR film

S. T. – In my opinion, interactivity is the future of the immersive industry, how can you involve the viewers in the film so each each one of them can have a unique experience based on their personality their moral and their opinion.

S. T. – History is indeed a great subject to create immersive story, we all know more or less about history but we’re a lot wishing to live it. But making films about history is also a kind of facilities , cause even if you add your point of vue, you still have to work on something that’s real. The biggest challenge is to create a new universe that can adapt to each and everyone of the viewers.