“We are convinced that our LBE strategy from the beginning is the one that prevails for our immersive experiences” – Chloé Jarry (Lucid Realities, Unframed Collection)

XRMust is at the Kaohsiung Film Festival this year, covering the event and in particular its XR Dreamland section, at the invitation of the French Office in Taipei. Here’s a look back at the activities of Lucid Realities, a production company with strong ties to Taiwan.

Production company XR Lucid Realities is celebrating its 6th anniversary this year. Their strategy, based mainly on the co-production with cultural institutions of immersive works to be shown as location-based entertainment (LBE), is today a model that is proving its worth and meeting with the market. For Lucid, 2024 also marks the launch of Unframed Collection, a new B2B distribution platform for cultural institutions.

Cover: MONSIEUR VINCENT, d’Agnès Molia & Gordon

Distributor of Boris Labbé’s ITO MEIKYŪ, winner of the latest Venice Immersive Grand Prix, producer of experiences presented in major institutions such as the Musée d’Orsay and Singapore’s ArtScience Museum, collaborator with libraries and media libraries, selected for international festivals such as the Kaohsiung Film Festival (Taiwan), the lights never seem to go out in the Paris offices of Lucid Realities and Unframed : the age of reason coming soon?

Lucid Realities celebrates its 6th anniversary in 2024. You were one of the pioneering companies in the immersive experience landscape, where do you stand today?

Chloé Jarry: Lucid Realities is doing well. It’s been a good year, opening with the LA PALETTE DE VAN GOGH experience at the Musée d’Orsay to complement their exhibition dedicated to the famous painter. Then we launched Unframed collection in March, won the Grand Prix as distributor in September with ITO MEIKYŪ by Boris Labbé (Sacrebleu Productions) at Venice immersive, where we also went as producer with the selection of CECI EST MON CŒUR by Nicolas Blies and Stéphane Hueber-Blies, which we co-produced with a_Bahn alongside Phi Studios.

It’s been a great year, thanks to our conviction that the strategy we’ve followed since the very beginning is the right one today. Betting on LBE in cultural venues, involving museums from the outset of each project, is a model that works. This is clearly evident from the number of experiments on the Unframed catalog. More and more studios, directors and museums believe in this model. We’ve also chosen to make XR accessible to as many people as possible – that’s our public service aspect. Thanks to Unframed Collection, we’re working more and more with libraries and media libraries, so that XR can be available in all regions. 2024 is clearly a pivotal year that validates these choices and our vision of the structuring of the sector, with the importance of distribution for all projects.

How do you view the health of immersive and interactive writing?

C.J : There are many definitions of health! In terms of economic health, XR remains a complex sector, with major financing issues. Creations are often difficult to finance. We’re hoping that the economic model will develop thanks to the introduction of ticketing. What’s more, we’re seeing that audiences are willing to pay to see experiences, which is an important sign. If we’re talking about health in terms of creativity, I think we need even more authors in XR. NOIRE (COLORED), for example, demonstrated that the quality of the writing was fundamental, and I think that’s one of the great successes of this project, the power of the story. We’ve managed to find directors, now we need to encourage scriptwriters to come and explore our writing. That’s one of our roles as a production company, and we often talk about it among producers. And when it comes to audience health, there’s real diversity and enthusiasm, and the public is there. We need to continue building networks to be able to offer them experiences.

What stories would you like to tell?

Lucid Realities’ editorial line is fairly well established today: offering projects for all audiences based on art and history. But on a whim, we can move into other universes, as with CECI EST MON CŒUR (see our article). We always try to approach subjects from their sensitive side, as opposed to experiments that would be more didactic. We’re also working on a fiction project, although our specialty remains documentary stories applied to the new creative field of XR.

How do you work internationally, and in particular with Taiwan?

C.J : We aim for the international market with Unframed when we talk about distribution. For the projets production with Lucid Realities, we are involved in international co-productions. We have special ties with Taiwan. I think I was one of the first XR producers to go there, back in 2018. We’ve done a lot of groundwork to create links and meetings with Taiwanese professionals.

We’ve been working with the Kaohsiung Film Festival since 2019, and we were awarded a TAICCA grant in 2020 for the project THE STARRY SAND BEACH, which I subsequently juried. We collaborate of course with VIVE Arts, but also with cultural institutions such as Taipei’s National Palace and the Taichung Museum of Fine Arts. Unframed was also supported by Taiwan thanks to collaboration with Pumpkin studio, a Kaohsiung-based partner, which developed certain technical elements of the platform, in particular for PCVR. New discussions have also sprung up with studios we’d like to work with on future projects, such as Serendipity and Flash Forward Entertainment.

So this year you launched Unframed Collection, a distribution platform for cultural institutions. How are the first few months going?

C.J: Of course, it’s too early to make an assessment – the platform is only a few months old – but the first few months have gone very well, with some great partnerships within the XR ecosystem, such as with Astrea, but also with a number of studios. Targo, for example, has entrusted us with the LBE distribution of their experiences. Unframed was not born to be Lucid Realities’ distributor, but to be open to all projects. Cultural institutions are very receptive to this new player, even if they still need a lot of support, which is perfectly normal. Unframed is also beginning to be well identified internationally. Distributing selected, award-winning works such as FLOW and ITO MEIKYŪ in their first year is an excellent signal and a real reward for all the creative and distribution teams.

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