Culture is future » Innovation and digital

CULTURAL START-UP OF THE WEEK: Small Bang

Next-up on our online cultural entrepreneur series, the Forum d’Avignon would like to introduce: Small Bang, a native transmedia studio that produces entertainment content across multiple platforms, both digital and physical: film, animation…

What is your project/idea/start-up?

Small Bang is a creative studio founded by Pierre Cattan in 2012 that defines itself as an interactive orchestra, a cultural and citizen-oriented innovations lab that places human experience at the core of the narrative digital path.

For 4 years, Small Bang produces experiences that link physical and digital worlds. From Birdlab’s participative science to Cinemacity’s geolocalized strolls, including Phallaina’s graphic scrolling novel, we are looking for new forms of spatialized and interactive storytelling. Since Cinemacity, in 2013, we kept a very strong link with cinema. We produced, in the end of 2015, Morphosis, a documentary game that accompanies Jacques Perrin’s last movie Les Saisons, released in January 2016. Between animated series and video game, Morphosis addresses a family target and helps the user to understand everything about the evolution of ecosystems since the ice age to now. Co-produced by Galatée Films and France TV, who also produced the movie Les Saisons, and funded by Pathé and the CNC, Morphosis is a real original creation that extends the environment of Jacques Perrin’s movie.

What is your current challenge?

Ongoing projects in the studio should allow us to sustain our activity and extend our explorations. These are hybrid projects, looking for innovative contact areas, linking iconoclast universes such as linguistics, graphic novel, spirituality, philosophy, quantum sciences, dance, permaculture, mythology, narratives and knowledge, the wide gap between “Demain” and “Minecraft”. These are projects in which cinema as a language and emotional vector is always present. The major challenge that we are taking up for our development is to finally manage to connect territories that do not know or meet each other, professions, disciplines and cultures waiting to mix in order to make alive crazy projects that have become realizable. It is a work that cinema always tried to do by telling the world, and it is in the manner of filmmakers that we live our practices. The challenge also lies in the great effort of clarity for our projects, and in the quality of the dialogue with our partners and interlocutors. Finally, we wish more than ever to establish a constant dialogue with active and reactive audiences that are mobilizing every day in our society.

For you, what does it mean to be a cultural entrepreneur?

Small Bang is deeply attached to culture in all of its forms: popular, academic, subversive, acknowledge or defended, mainstream or niche. Being a cultural entrepreneur means orienting projects towards innovative and virtuous business models. These models must become financially autonomous while allowing a large accessibility for users, both regarding uses and costs. In order to do it, we must dare and create contact points between the world of culture, in the classical meaning, and that of collaborative economy or interactive productions for example. It is about creating new models that create works and jobs, offering new cultural experiences to a large audience. 

Photo Credit © Jean-Fabien Leclanche

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