felix & paul studios – The Concordian

Concordia’s president speaker series featured alumnus and entrepreneur Félix Lajeunesse

Once a Concordia film production student, Félix Lajeunesse is now the co-founder of one of the largest virtual reality companies in the world, Felix & Paul Studios. At a panel discussion on Feb. 12, he shared insight on how he and his team built a virtual reality studio from scratch with nothing but a dream in mind.

“When I studied film production in 2003, the dream was to be a film director,” Lajeunesse said. “At that time, I would have not guessed that I would end up doing work in a different medium than cinema.”

Lajeunesse’s talk, led by professor Daniel Cross of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, was part of Concordia’s president speakers series on digital futures. The conversation discussed virtual reality (VR) technology and its application for users around the world.

VR technology and projects immerse viewers in different worlds. In the early years of Felix & Paul Studios, Lajeunesse and his partner, Paul Raphaël, focused on building a camera to create an immersive, 360-degree experience. Their goal was to experiment with 3D technology that would give viewers an immersive cinematic experience rather than just an interactive one. “You feel like you’re there. You feel present inside the story, completely immersed, emotionally and psychologically, but you can’t say hi to the people in [that] world,” Lajeunesse said.

Creating Felix & Paul Studios has given Lajeunesse and Raphaël the opportunity to collaborate with notable figures, such as Barack Obama, Reese Witherspoon and LeBron James. Their team is composed of filmmakers, as well as engineers, programmers, sound technicians and others who diverge from the traditional filmmaking crew.

Lajeunesse said he chose the medium of VR because it shares stories from the perspective of the viewer, not the director. For example, a simulation of reality created by Felix & Paul Studios gives viewers the opportunity to feel like they are sitting face-to-face with former U.S. President Barack Obama.

According to Lajeunesse, their business model was risky because it involved investing in a medium that wasn’t considered an industry yet. It payed off, however, as Lajeunesse and Raphaël got their first investment from Phoebe Greenberg, the founder of the Phi Centre, a multidisciplinary art centre in Montreal. Lajeunesse said Greenberg believed in their project and gave them the financial backing to get the company started.

Lajeunesse said believing in their vision for Felix & Paul Studios is what kept him and Raphaël going as creatives. “We had to find a way to sell our dreams,” he said. “We had to find a way to package our desires and our vision of whatever we were building and sell it, to convince people that there was a business case inside of it.”

For more information about Felix & Paul Studios’ upcoming projects, check out their website at felixandpaul.com.

Feature image taken by Kirubel Mehari

Felix & Paul Studios, held a panel discussion at the SXSW festival in Austin on March 14

The first time Felix & Paul Studios was at the SXSW festival was back in 2014, where they screened Strangers, one of their first virtual reality projects. Since then, the Montreal-based studio has become a leader in immersive storytelling.

Co-founders Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël, along with chief content officer Ryan Horrigan and director of sound design Jean-Pascal Beaudoin, held a panel discussion on March 14 on virtual reality (VR) production.

Their studios have become experts in cultivating presence-based storytelling, which, as Raphaël pointed out during the panel, doesn’t just ‘happen’ because you have the technology. A 360-degree film isn’t inherently immersive because it is 360 degrees. It is immersive because of the way the visual and auditory elements work together to make you feel present in the story.

“The first step, and the most important one, is to position the viewer inside of the scene,” says Lajeunesse. “The way we place the viewer inside the scene will create the relation to the characters, to the story, so that’s really the most vital decision we have to make on set.”

In order to cultivate the abstract notion of ‘presence,’ a cornerstone of successful immersive works, the panelists spoke about building a bond between the audience and the narrative, making the viewer part of the film rather than a static spectator.

One of the challenges with 360-degree cinematography is that there is no single frame, since you can look around. However, there is composition, which can be separated into near field, mid field and far field. These fields add depth to the visual aspect of the medium. According to Lajeunesse, the objects in near field are the most crucial, as they make the viewer feel integrated in the scene.

One of the complexities of immersive film is the audio component. In order to be successful, the audio aspect of a work must be taken into consideration at the beginning of the process. In VR, sound cannot be an afterthought, and must be totally integrated into the production. According to Beaudoin, sound is a pillar of the VR experience. Without good sound, the notion of presence is lost.

Interested in seeing some of Felix & Paul Studios’ newest projects? Head over to the Phi Centre in Montreal, where several of their works are currently being shown. Admission is free.