The Enemy - Interactive Storytelling
Making of
There were a number of challenges in creating The Enemy:
To access reclusive and often out-of-reach individuals active in armed groups. To come equipped with the right material and the best team. To create a simple backdrop, a neutral light, and a professional studio in difficult locations. To master the technology of 3-D scans, to explain it to the combatants, and to perform scans of each of them.
And while on location, to precisely record the body language of each of these men as they speak, as they move and as they look at me with eyes that say so much.
Then, back in Paris, to arrange all of these interviews by each tenth of a second and to put them in a spatial dimension. To integrate this material into a new form of journalism. To think, to test, to design, to rethink, to test again, to develop, to start all over again, in Montreal, New York or Paris. To boil down the countless conversations with producers, team members, engineers and techs, scientists, designers, and users to the essentials in order to create a genuine virtual experience of a face-to-face encounter. To build a fine-tuned tracking system. To detect one visitor, then three, then twenty. To bring individuals closer to you and to bring you closer to them through a headset or a mobile phone.
There were a number of challenges in creating The Enemy:
To access reclusive and often out-of-reach individuals active in armed groups. To come equipped with the right material and the best team. To create a simple backdrop, a neutral light, and a professional studio in difficult locations. To master the technology of 3-D scans, to explain it to the combatants, and to perform scans of each of them.
And while on location, to precisely record the body language of each of these men as they speak, as they move and as they look at me with eyes that say so much.
Then, back in Paris, to arrange all of these interviews by each tenth of a second and to put them in a spatial dimension. To integrate this material into a new form of journalism. To think, to test, to design, to rethink, to test again, to develop, to start all over again, in Montreal, New York or Paris. To boil down the countless conversations with producers, team members, engineers and techs, scientists, designers, and users to the essentials in order to create a genuine virtual experience of a face-to-face encounter. To build a fine-tuned tracking system. To detect one visitor, then three, then twenty. To bring individuals closer to you and to bring you closer to them through a headset or a mobile phone.
To move in synch as new technologies appear and evolve, to align our intentions with the hardware’s potential. To embrace the many unknown parts until they are no longer unknown. More than three years ago, we launched a production that brought my team and me to four continents. We invited more than 1,500 testers with very different backgrounds, ethnicities and origins. We presented parts of the work in academic settings, at festivals, and in schools. All of this to address one single question: Could I be you if I was on the other side? We make sense of the world through stories, and we remember it through experiences. What happens then when someone else’s story becomes your experience?
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