Back on "La Zone" transmedia project

Why the webdocumentary ? Because a fantasy was taking shape before our eyes, the fantasy to reduce the distance between words and things, between observed reality and its re-transcription, between the complexity of an image and the all too simplistic nature of signs. Because by using video, sound and a graphic interface (in addition to photo and text), we were no longer reasoning in terms of a simple report but also an experience. To offer an experience, as simple and fragile as it might be.

 

Transmedia was not talked about much at the time, at least not as much as it is today. 

A few months later, when the Centre National du Cinéma gave us a 20,000 Euro writing grant, we went back to Chernobyl and spent three days in the ruins of Pripiat. Exhaustion was taking over. We knew the city in its tiniest details. The spectacle had taken everything away. Not a single room without its books open on the right page, offered up for the cameras. The only reality that still has meaning there is the reality of the radiometer and its piercing screams. The rest is all staged.

 

Then there was Ivankov and that café where, one evening, a young woman came up to us and introduced us to Vitaliy, a massive brute who showed us the zone in a way we had never seen before. Back in Paris, Paris Match commissioned a full report on the traffic of metal out of the contaminated zone. The Zone project was seeing the light of day. It would be dedicated to life in and around the forbidden zone of Chernobyl.

 

We did four reports for four different magazines (Paris Match, Elle, Amica, Géo). Nikon lent us equipment. We spent four months in the zone, spread out over four seasons,  15 000 kilometers,  5 flat tires,  getting stuck in the snow 3 times,  stuck in the sand 2 times,  6 benders,   1 arrest. Thousands of photos,  70 hours of footage.  A budget of 60,000 euros.

Over the course of our trips to the Urkaine, our goals became more specific. From our blog, which serves as the bare bones of the project, we wish to work on distinctive forms and narrations, on different types of formats. To create distances. To play with frictions.

 

In September 2010, we met again with David Coujard and Arnaud Colinart of the production company Agat Films & Co.  They were fully committed to joining us. Boris Razon, editor in chief of lemonde.fr, became the co-producer and distributor. La Gaîté Lyrique became part of the project and made possible, in addition to the installation, the publication of the book in partnership with Naïve. The CNC granted us 50,000 euros in production aid. 

Our transmedia documentary was defined: the webdocumentary would tell of the life of the men and women living near Reactor 4; the installation would offer the audience an immersive experience guided by chance and accident; the book would be a narration of our travels in the zone. A cubist approach. Each form comes into collision with the other two. Each experience is distinct. Each media finds its voice and each format its narration.

 

La Zone is only revealed when the three come together. Three different elements, like that day spent at the Louvre exhibition “Antiquity in Dreams:”  in one corner, Psyche and Cupid were exhibited in three different formats (two paintings and one sculpture), in three different moments (from the encounter to David’s Psyche Abandoned), captured by three different artists, from three different time periods. In this set up, only the viewer, placed in the center, is in the position to rebuild and to live the experience. Transmedia before its time.

 

Bruno Masi

 

 

 

La Zone is a transmedia documentary directed by Guillaume Herbault and Bruno Masi. It is made up of a webdocumentary produced by Agat Film & Co. and lemonde.fr and distributed by lemonde.dr; of a book co-published by Naïve and La Gaîté Lyrique; and of a multimedia installation presented at La Gaîté Lyrique from April 26 to May 8, 2011.