Presented for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2018 (see our interview at that time, one of our first!), THE ROAMING is back! And this time Mathieu Pradat ‘s fascinating virtual and physical installation will delight the Cannes audience… in a completely new version.
Thinking back to what was still called Venice VR at the time, I feel a bit nostalgic. VR was not new to the world, but it was certainly new to me, and each piece I experienced felt like an attempt by artists to take us “where no person has gone before”.
Some works in particular challenged the boundaries of the virtual worlds to immerse the audience into a hybrid experience that involved those senses that even today technology sometimes excludes: smell, touch… To this day, those experiences remain vivid in my mind and one of them is THE ROAMING, created by Mathieu Pradat.
I have allowed myself this somewhat personal introduction because I must admit that I was honestly thrilled when I saw that this work – which I though about, from time to time, over the years – was selected for the first edition of the Immersive Competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
That’s why it was such a pleasure to be able to talk to the author and director, Mathieu Pradat, and find out more about the evolution of THE ROAMING since Venice, and recover a few spoilers – nothing we can’t share, mind you – about what we will see in Cannes these days.
The long way home: THE ROAMING, from Venice to Cannes
Mathieu Pradat – We presented THE ROAMING at the Venice Film Festival in 2018. At that time, we did not have the full version you can experience today, but only a first chapter, about ¼ of the story.
M. P. – That was six years ago, and it has been such a long journey! Our production process was interrupted for some time, but in 2023 we were finally able to get back to work, and we were faced with a big XR project, with all the challenges it entails.
M. P. – This emerging art form encompasses everything and that is one of the reasons why it is so complicated: it uses cinematic tools, but also video games dynamics, it draws on theater but also on a kind of innovative radio form, with the use of binaural ambisonic sound. It is a very broad domain of production, which makes it very challenging, especially if your production involves live mocaps, live tracking, the need to buy headsets for venues you’re proposing your work to, animation, actors. It’s difficult, but I love what I do and I love immersive storytelling.
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M. P. – I’ve also been lucky enough to work with some extremely competent and dedicated studios. First and foremost, Small Creative, who are associate producers on the project and have deployed a very broad range of skills on The Roaming: from the creation of the virtual environments to the development of the entire narrative and the motion capture. There are some very demanding real-time requirements to bring to life an experience like that, and this demands a very unique kind of creative and intellectual engineering. This project would not have been possible without them.
M. P. – G4F in Angoulême has been a very solid partner, too. I’m extremely satisfied with their work. There’s a kind of precision and sobriety, but also some extremely original and musical touches in this soundtrack that envelops and leaves room for the actor.
Finally, Zeilt in Luxembourg is a studio well known to animation fans. Their work on The Roaming, both in quality and quantity, is impressive. We’re far from having the financing of a feature film, even an independent film, to produce this type of work.
M. P. – In terms of technology, the changes in recent years have been huge and rapid. At Venice Virtual Reality we were using the Vive Focus Pro in tethering and backpacks. They were a very intrusive technology that we had to make heavy use of. You’d think the difficulties would be more technical – for example to keep the batteries charged – but for us there was a much more poignant issue, which was narrative: how could we justify to our users the use of a backpack? We had to invent solutions as to why they had to carry them in the story. Narratively, we turned them into normal backpacks, which the audience would have to carry like the children in the story.
M. P. – On the other hand, we didn’t have to worry much about the graphics: we had very good graphics cards in the backpacks that allowed us to very easily visualize the shaders and the lights and create this sort of expressionist, film noir atmosphere from the 40s/50s.
M. P. – Within a couple of years, the first good stand-alone headsets were released and that certainly made a lot of things easier. There was no doubt that we would use them both to facilitate the distribution of the work and for the experiential quality of being able to participate in the experience without bulky tools on your person.
M. P. – Where some aspects were simplified, others were lost: first and foremost, the graphic quality. Achieving good texturing became a challenge. While solutions for shaders could be found, lighting up the experience was absolutely complicated. We could not use more than one global light, which meant that many lights were sometimes baked into the texture.
M. P. – Having a pre-illuminated texture deprives the experience of a sense of dynamism. Which is in total contradiction with our work, because one adjective I’d use to qualify the experience we are designing is, in fact, ‘dynamic’: the environment changes, the user moves, touches and activates things. The user and the simulation interact with each other dynamically. But the same does not happen with the lights. This is why we had to work hard to maintain the visual expression we wanted in the first version, and I must say that it was not easy at all.
M. P. – And then one last big change was the switch to multi-user.
Facing violence alone and together: from single-user to multi-user version
M. P. – In Venice, the work was presented as a single-user one. This somehow created a form of intimacy between the player and our live actor. I really wanted to maintain this feeling, this relationship. I was not interested in the multi-user aspect just for the sake of distribution. I wanted it to be a necessity, because, in a contrasting way, almost, it was what could enable me to preserve the feeling that at times we are completely alone.
M. P. – Basically, THE ROAMING is about violence, confronting violence, and seeing children and a woman do the same: what I feel in the end, in my mind and in my heart, is that I have to make a conscious choice on how to face this violence. At a certain point of the experience we find ourselves alone and there we have to make our own personal decision towards this violence. An individual decision that, however, will have a collective social impact.
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M. P. – It was important to me to stress this concept out. Sometimes it is necessary to feel the horror and fear of being alone, to face our monsters by ourselves, as children do, and there is no one there to help. There are choices no one can make for us. But once we face this horror, we do not have to keep being alone. We need both experiences in life to achieve collective strength and self-defense.
M. P. – It was a long and iterative writing process, definitely.
M. P. – At the beginning of the first chapter and until almost two-thirds of the way through, our user is alone in a somewhat dangerous world. At some point they meet the other people who are part of the adventure, and there is something that unites them and pushes them to help each other and help the children who are lost in the swamp. And the ending has a further development that I won’t tell to avoid spoilers…
M. P. – Anyway, as far as the piece is concerned, the main evolution between Venice Virtual Reality and Cannes Immersive was the work done to find a way to keep the core of this story- its core of emotions and intimacy- but also to make sense of the group dynamics.
Engaging with the story beyond interactivity
M. P. – To facilitate the user experience, we moved in two precise directions.
M. P. – Firstly, we made the choice to start slowly: few things to see, but many things to hear and pay attention to. The user has to stop and concentrate in order not to miss the story.
M. P. – We minimized the animations that you would put in a normal scene and this was, I think, a very effective way of alerting people and keeping their attention. Even during the onboarding, we use a lot of sound and whispering, and that makes people become proactive without even realizing they are.
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M. P. – We then move on to small interactions: following a light or touching it on the surface of the water. Or moving away from it collectively so that everything goes dark and you can understand that to find your way in the dark you have to get closer to that same light.
M. P. – From these small interactions in the first chapter, we move on to the slightly more elaborate ones in the second, where horrible devouring dogs threaten the children and the audience can fend them off using the light. And then of course the finale offers even more in terms of interaction, but by then we have learnt the language of the piece and so interacting is much easier.
M. P. – The second thing we did was to shift the focus of the story from interaction to narrative.
M. P. – I started working in this field around 2015-2016 and at the time I was focusing almost exclusively on the people who were interacting, thinking that if someone did not interact it meant that they weren’t really engaged in the experience.
M. P. – Then, in the course of the interviews and questionnaires I did, I found out that sometimes the most passive people are actually the ones most involved in the story, most aware of what is happening. This gave me a lot to think about.
M. P. – Six years ago we, as creatives, were all trying to better understand the basic grammar of immersive storytelling and in a way it is still an ongoing process. For example, there were questions about how to make people look in a specific direction, perhaps through a sudden sound behind them. And sure, a ploy like that facilitates the surprise effect.
M. P. – But with THE ROAMING, today, we decided to almost go back to the basics of narrative drama, and one of them is narrative tension, and being emotionally invested in the story, in what’s going to happen to the characters. So now we no longer want our user to keep looking around, but rather we want them to focus on what’s happening in that moment, in that space.
M. P. – We chose to work on finding the right position and the right distance for the user, so that they could enjoy the scene happening in front of their eyes.
M. P. – The staging in XR, from this point of view, is not only about the action, the world, the characters, but also about positioning the user. The fundamental question we need to ask ourselves is how to facilitate this positioning. In our case, we worked both on a narrative level and with our live actor, always trying to maintain the emotional and dramatic tension without people having to struggle to interact or look all over the place.
M. P. – One last thing we tried to ensure was to give users who don’t want to interact at all and prefer to observe the opportunity to feel involved in the experience. We gave them something specific to look at and understand, something that is actually relevant to the story and, if shared with the other users and the Mystic Man – our actor – facilitates their presence and improvisation.
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Visualizing spaces in new ways
M. P. – My training as an architect was fundamental to working in this field and staging THE ROAMING too.
M. P. – One of the key things that students in architecture schools learn is to imagine in their heads the spaces represented only on paper. In the same way that a composer, just by reading the partition, can hear the music, the architect reads the plan or model and is already mentally walking through the space and seeing how the sun hits the corners and illuminates the rooms… It is a huge effort because buildings can be big, materials can be complex to imagine and so colors, and they can be reflected in peculiar ways.
M. P. – It requires a lot of training and at the beginning I was not very gifted in this sense; it’s just something I learnt through studying, but it’s something I now find fundamental in my work. I can see the set in my head, imagine the distance and the people walking, and I must say that visualizing things in this way is a great help in simulating the space.
Music to recreate an atmosphere
M. P. – The music in THE ROAMING is absolutely essential. Frédéric Verrières, our composer, is the author of the two songs you will hear live, but he also created diegetic music inspired by Hollywood noir films. So there is an interesting comparison, in the piece, between live and recorded music which, in my opinion, works very well.
M. P. – I am always happy to work with Frédéric, by the way. We have known each other for several years and his approach to music is incredibly contemporary! His work is always a reinterpretation and deconstruction of genre music. He takes Debussy and tries to pull the listener into the partition. That’s what he has done with many works, sometimes building them around a single motif and trying to expand it in new, original ways. For THE ROAMING, he created almost a lullaby, which is extremely engaging in tone and fits wonderfully with the ambience and atmosphere we are trying to convey.
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Challenges of distributing a physical piece
M. P. – In Cannes we present the experience with the most complete set-up. Our users will walk barefoot on the floor, coming into contact with different objects, feeling the wind as they move ‘on the boat’. In the scene where Dorothy, our female character, is behind bars, it will not be possible to get close to her because the users will be blocked by physical bars.
M. P. – THE ROAMING has its own specific physical structure and we try to recreate it in the different exhibitions we show this work at.
M. P. – We take everything with us except for the sound system, which venues can usually provide. We also don’t take the spotlights, which we don’t use much except for the entrance and the end of the performance, when the actor and the users take off their headsets.
M. P. – For these distribution-related aspects, co-production has helped us a lot. We have a French-Canadian and Luxembourg co-production, respectively Normal Studio and Wild Fang Films. In France you cannot buy hardware with public money, but you can- under certain conditions, naturally- in Canada and Luxembourg. So our partners were able to support us in this respect as well, and that was crucial because many venues do not have the technological parterre necessary to stage works like ours.
M. P. – The distribution problem has been the same for many years. Now, finally, something is moving. Some producers and distributors, such as Diversion Cinema and Lucid Realities, have structured their offers in two directions: the first, clearly identified, is for works that choose online distribution; the other is to approach institutions or museums to provide ideas and proposals on an artistic level.
M. P. – Both of these directions leave little room for free roaming experiences. They are not yet part of the ongoing effort to standardize distribution. Honestly, I believe that such works simply cannot be placed in venues that were created for other purposes. There is a different culture behind them, there are different constraints. So I think we need, from this point of view, new spaces for new artforms that require different equipment, specially designed sound and light systems, headsets, and so on…
M. P. – I think of those productions that are in the middle of different fields, such as dancing productions that use digital hardware and are moving towards hybridisation. Works such as these, which are profoundly linked to the choreographic field, should undoubtedly be welcomed in dance centers, in theaters, or in similar cultural venues. But to make this happen, there needs to be a cultural battle to convince people that it is possible to welcome them!
M. P. – My feeling, in fact, is that many venues, while appreciating the offer, are scared of it. Perhaps this is something that concerns France more than other countries, but it is a fear related to reputation. These venues do not want to be associated with what they perceive to be merely technological projects. They want more, and tend to forget that so many art forms, such as cinema, also involve technology. As with a film, an immersive experience should also be valued as something more than a technical or technological object. The very people who experience these works realize that.
M. P. – It is crucial to adopt a pedagogical and patient attitude and show people that ours is simply an emerging art form that uses a new technology.
M. P. – You can hate it, you can love it, you can be indifferent… but there is no need to be afraid of it.
THE ROAMING will be available in Cannes from 15 to 24 May.
You can book experiences on the Immersive selection page and visit THE ROAMING website to find out more about its story.
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