After several years in development, Mathieu Pradat had a successful year in 2024, presenting two multi-user experiences at festivals. After THE ROAMING at Cannes, RENCONTRES made its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. This latest project was the result of a lengthy process, including several weeks of prototype development at Villa Formose. Here’s a look back at a creative odyssey.
Cover: ENCOUNTERS @ Venice Immersive 2024 📸 Lin-Yunchen
How did the idea for the ENCOUNTERS project come about? How did you come up with this project?
Mathieu Pradat – I don’t remember exactly how this project came about. Perhaps from notes in a notebook somewhere, a dream or even a daydream, in which I saw a few scenes from the first chapter. In this chapter there’s an intruder, a kind of human figure that springs out of us, that we try to reach but can’t. When the human figure seems to calm down, we try to reach him. When the human figure seems to calm down, there are meetings, people gather in a circle and whisper. It’s impossible to be part of their group. It’s like looking in a mirror with no reflection. I imagined that these people were on the water and that sometimes they were reflected above us, with the water acting as a mirror.

M. P. – When I was imagining these scenes, I made some drawings and felt like doing the ENCOUNTERS experience. I thought about it and then it became something more conscious. When I started drawing and writing this first chapter, it was called La Foule (The Crowd).
M. P. – I looked for partners among the professionals I knew, especially among the people I worked with on L’ERRANCE / THE ROAMING (2018). When we presented the project in front of different institutions, we realised how complex it was and how difficult it would be to visualise, because it mixes saturation and minimalism – in a slightly surreal way. We wanted to highlight the presence of users in the space and their participation through collective interactions, by being all together.
In terms of aesthetics, what was your inspiration?
M. P. – When it comes to aesthetics, we don’t always realise that we don’t all share the same references. Everyone understands things according to their own history. In the case of RENCONTRES, I personally had in mind film noirs from the 40s, like Billy Wilder’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY, films with men in mackintoshes and hats who whisper something to you and then kill you without you even having time to understand why. After the RENCONTRES experience, people talked to me about surrealism and Magritte. I wasn’t consciously making the connection.

M. P. – I had also imagined that the human figures would vibrate visually according to the distance. Far away they are silhouettes, close up they are full and detailed. The viewer is guided towards them. It’s a question of attention. In the same vein, a sort of trail made up of white triangles settles as the characters pass, and it’s always easy to tell where they’ve come from and where they’re going. In this minimalist landscape where we are trying to understand what the world we are presented with is all about, these simple principles make the experience easy, intuitive and vibrant, in motion.
M. P. – The addition of water on the ground and the rain sequences were inspired by the animated films of Miyazaki and the films of Hsiao-Hsien Hou. In order to encourage users to interact, I knew that I didn’t want to include a voice-over dictating instructions, as in traditional documentaries, but to give the audience a certain amount of freedom.
RENCONTRES is a very ambitious and complex experiment in terms of production. What challenges have you had to face?
M. P. – I thought RENCONTRES would be a simpler project, which was my ambition, because big projects are very difficult to develop and take a long time to move forward. I still had the idea of including water in the project, so I got in touch with the developer André Berlemont and the SoWhen?, The CreaTech Company, co-founded by Freddy Koné and Mohamed Marouène. It was a real chance to work with a team that had real expertise and thought through the production of each project. I think I made the right decision in proposing to Mohamed and Freddy that they should be co-producers and not just service providers, because that enabled us to think through the whole project together.

M. P. – Our big challenge was trying to integrate water into the multiplayer experience. At the beginning, when we proposed this option to people, we heard all kinds of noises. They’d tell us it wasn’t possible, that we’d have to be careful with infrared, potential infinite reflections, how difficult it would be to regulate the light and so on. I thought we weren’t going to be able to get the project off the ground and get through the prototyping phase. We were lucky enough to talk to Agnès Alfandari, who at the time was digital director at the Institut Français, and who was able to point us in the direction of a residency linked to Novembre Numérique. We also had the opportunity to work on the project in Quito thanks to the Quito – UDLA Immersive Residency, organised by the NewImages Hub of the Forum des images, in partnership with the Alianza Francesa and the University of the Americas (UDLA). We realised that the production of RENCONTRES was simpler than that of THE ROAMING. The team could work as it wished, but then covid-19 came along. The pandemic delayed production.

M. P. – I tried to use this time to come up with a solid script, which was very stable throughout production, something I’m not always good at. I extended and developed the principle of saturating worlds, which was minimalist at the outset: and the food that living creatures eat, birds, means of transport and so on. I wanted the experience to be very contrasting, dark, hard, although funny at times at the beginning, but full of hope at the end, and for this hope to come from the participants themselves. So we created a participatory experience, which was one of the most difficult aspects to tackle in production, along with multi-user development. We were very lucky to have the support of the CNC for both the writing and the development.
M. P. – We set out to make a multiplayer prototype, but at that time HTC hadn’t yet released VBMS with the floor or wall marking system that is now widely used. We also had to be careful with the code, which is very demanding, because in RENCONTRES almost everything is interactive, and this has a huge impact on the narrative, with the sensation of saturated space. We stuck to what we wanted to do, even if it meant more work for the developers, whom I hired directly for production.

M. P. – To find a solution at the time, we took some standalone headsets that had just come out and added Vive trackers to the Quest headsets with 3D-printed legs. So in fact we used the outside-in tracking system of the HTC VIVE to work with the inside-out of the Meta Quest.
How did the Villa Formose residency in Taiwan enable you to develop the project even further?
M. P. – We were selected for the Villa Formose residency in Kaohsiung and the experience was fantastic. It was an incredible discovery for the whole team. There, we focused on the participative dimension of the experience and on user interaction with digital beings. What’s more, we implemented the ability to record a voice message, a sort of haiku, during the experience, which can be replayed in subsequent versions. For the time being, at least, we’re gathering these initial recordings.
M. P. – In Taiwan, we worked mainly on the sound, with a really talented team made up of sound designers Chieh Wen Meng, developers YuJie Huang and sound director JinYao Lin, supported by project manager Jamie Lin and producer Estela Valdivieso Chen from Serendipity Films. During the residency, the French and Taiwanese teams developed such a wonderful synergy that we decided to extend it by inviting them to the next residency in Avignon, during which we had the great support of Véronique Baton from Grenier à Sel. There (where we had already been able to work in multi-user mode before going to Taiwan, with water from the end of Covid), and with Freddy Koné and Loïc Vigor, we developed and streamlined the interactive aspects. Thanks to the Grenier à Sel, we’ve once again had the opportunity to invite a wide range of audiences to try out this first full version.

Why did you come up with this slightly freer interaction model?
M. P. – In 2023, during our creative residency at the Grenier à Sel in Avignon, we tested the experiment on a large scale, to see how difficult the multiplayer format can be. We observed the differences in user behaviour, with those who liked to experiment and interact and those who took a more passive observer’s stance. After the experiment, the users also completed a questionnaire. This is how we were able to learn, in a very free and somewhat experimental way, because nobody really knows what to do when creating.
M. P. – I love the fact that virtual reality can be heterogeneous. In immersive experiences, you can act or not, so there’s always the possibility of just looking and sometimes you forget about that.
M. P. – There was a time when we were all interested in interaction, so in the experiences we absolutely had to get people to act. But virtual reality is a simulation, and in this digital environment, maybe people just want to watch. I realised this quite quickly, which I find very interesting, especially in a multi-player experience. So we also decided to leave room for contemplation. We’ve also built in a series of collective interactions (feeding the birds, entering the circles, etc.), which encourage the audience to wonder what’s going to happen next.
After a work session dedicated to distributing the project with SoWhen? RENCONTRES is a flightcase with a laminated A4 sheet of instructions, 6 VR headsets and a 5 cm micro PC. Deployment takes 20 minutes, for a multi-user experience of 6 people and 40 minutes.
https://www.mathieupradat.com/index_realisateur_rencontre.html
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