TARGO’s works have always been considered excellences in 360, and even now that the focus of this company has broadened to include interactive elements, the awards and mentions for what they create continue to grow. Starting with their latest work, JFK Memento, whose most recent nomination to date is for Stereopsia’s European XR Awards®.
We caught up with Victor Agulhon, co-founder of this Emmy®-nominated studio, to talk about the evolutions in their productions, but also about the mainstream direction they have always found it important to pursue.
Today, your VR documentary productions are shown in schools, museums and on specialist stores, making them easily accessible to a wide range of audiences. What can you tell us about how your approach to the general public has evolved since the early days?
I am proud to say that our vision and commitment to the mainstream has not changed in these years. It is what has driven us from the day we started until today. The question is still, how do we bring this technology into the mainstream world, and how do we create content that speaks to as many people as possible?
What we had to do in these years was not to switch direction, but to follow the changes the term “mainstream” faced.
The constant release of new headsets, more powerful, easier to use, with more features have a profound impact on how we work at TARGO. Not so much from a storytelling point of view-we continue to look for stories that are familiar, that speak to everyone, and I don’t think society has changed that much in that respect in recent years.
For us, it’s more a question of an evolution in the way we present our stories. There are now more technologies and more forms that we can exploit. A simple example is the move from 360° films to interactive experiences. If we are now producing all these formats, it’s because sales of the Meta Quest headsets have enabled us to gain an initial understanding of the medium.
Is that why your productions fit in so well with the LBE cultural distribution circuits?
I think it’s precisely because of this. Because our work is mainstream and approachable.
What we do when we work on documentaries is bridging the gap between the real world that people know today and the world of virtual reality. Sometimes virtual reality seems a little far-fetched, with productions that are a little too deep and far removed from the concerns of people today. The stories we like to make at TARGO, on the other hand, are stories about issues that people are familiar with, and I think this is a small step in getting them interested in VR.
People are curious to watch a documentary on the JFK assassination in the immersive format because they are interested in watching a JFK documentary in any format. This is a topic they understand and therefore feel in control of. The step they have to take to approach this new technology is therefore a smaller one. If you offer to someone a multisensory experience available in one location only in the world, on a device they don’t know about, on a topic that is very obscure to them, there is a very low probability that the average user will be attracted to the idea and feel at ease enough trying it.
As much as the unknown intrigues us all, as producers, we have to offer clarity and simplicity to our audience. No one likes to grope in the dark; we all want to know what we are venturing into. So by creating experiences on topics that are familiar to our audiences, we give them the opportunity to feel a certain degree of control over the experience, and be more comfortable dealing with it in a new technology environment.
I think this is one of the main reasons why our stories work in the LBE environment, and I think it may also be one of the key elements for the success of immersive experiences in general.
What about from a curatorial perspective?
From a curatorial and programming perspective, we always try to provide incredible value through immersivity. By that I mean we always work to find what the immersive medium can provide that the 2D media cannot.
Let’s take the concrete example of JFK Memento, a documentary experience that is visiting many festivals, exhibitions, and soon museums. As much as you can watch every existing film about the Kennedy assassination—any existing media, documentary, movies—you never get the connection between all of them, you never get the full picture.
And that’s exactly where VR operates in this experience: it places you back physically on Dealey Plaza, where the assassination took place. From there, all of the films you know come to life around you, you can follow the car entering the Plaza, you move your head from right to left, you understand how everything is intertwined, where people are standing.
In this experience, what is outside the frame is what connects all the infamous photos and films. It’s what gives you the context, the big picture. When you’re in VR, your brain connects the dots.
For the first time, you have a spatial understanding of the scene, because we are now able to place you exactly in that place and at that time.
This is what we try to bring out in our stories: a deeper understanding of themes we thought we knew or understood. I think the JFK Memento experience does it very well. And that’s why curators, festivals and anyone who is trying to plan an event can use this experience effectively and easily, because it’s a great example of the value that immersive can offer on a topic that people already know about.
Have you had a chance to observe audience reactions to works like this?
As producers, we can’t follow as closely as we would like all the distribution steps, because we have to focus on producing the content, finding the funds, and building the story in the best ways.
But I must say that we have noticed incredible reactions in the United States to works like JFK Memento. Some spectators have lived their whole lives with this story. We realized that for them discovering a familiar story in radically new ways is extremely exciting.
Understanding something better through immersive media is a bit of a common thread in the success of many of our works.
How has distribution changed since you started working in the industry? Is your work facilitated by potential new distribution paths?
If you’ve been part of the VR industry in the last few years, say since 2018, you’ll know that everybody said that the 360 was dead. Everyone wanted to do real-time experiences in 6DOF – even us, mind you, we just never did it because we didn’t feel the format was mainstream enough. The only thing we could distribute on a large scale were 360 videos. So, for a long time, we limited our works to this format because a large accessibility was our priority.
Then, in 2022, we felt that Quest 2 had become sufficiently mainstream, and so we ventured into JFK Memento, which we distributed last year. And paradoxically, since we made this choice, so many festivals that want to distribute JFK Memento, ask us if we also have a 360 video of the experience available!
So, from a technical point of view, I think the VR industry lives by a mantra that says 360 movies are dead, which implies a huge push toward 6DOF and interactive content. But the reality is that the pieces that are most viewed and are easiest to distribute, even today, are still immersive videos.
So, this is the first aspect. The second distributional element I would like to mention is the increased fragmentation of distribution platforms and devices, with completely different power capabilities. This means that right now, as producers, we have to constantly make a choice about the medium and the platform. As the industry grows and matures, we have more and more different platforms to deal with, which puts a greater burden on production and distribution but also, obviously, an increasingly diverse audience that we have to take into account. An opportunity today, but one that is difficult to manage in the current state of the industry because it doesn’t necessarily imply more revenue. It is an issue that will need to be addressed carefully. Online distribution is critical to the sustainability of this sector.
The theme of time and space is recurrent in TARGO’s work. Can you explain why?
If you go even deeper, Chloé and I have always had long conversations on phenomenology, on the concept of reality, the existence of time and space. It turns out that virtual reality is an incredibly powerful medium to play with these concepts, and it has become a recurring theme in our experiences. When you’re blending time and space and virtual reality, it creates an eerie and magical sensation, it is something truly special, proper to the medium – it’s the ability to live something you never thought you’d live. Looking back, Rebuilding Notre-Dame is the first experience in which we used immersive technologies to blend time and space, and we haven’t really stopped since then.
Rebuilding Notre Dame is a documentary we produced in 2020, composed of footage of the cathedral before and after the fire, shot in the exact same place, with a smooth transition and fade from one to the other. It’s almost a magical moment for the user to see times and places blur together. It’s a feeling that I love and that we have been trying to recreate and improve in each of our works ever since.
In a way we feel like historians or archaeologists, offering the world something old, something from the past, but in a new and modern way. In Surviving 9/11 we scanned negatives of panoramic photos of 1990s New York, converted them to 3D and finally rendered them in VR. It was a huge amount of work that created a magical experience, and it made us feel like we were really making a concrete contribution to the world, and to this industry.
What about your next project?
Our next project will be about the D-Day landings in Normandy.
The starting point for us is always the same. On one side, a reflection on the medium, in this case the Apple Vision Pro, made us face a new question: how could an immersive mixed reality documentary work? We also liked the idea of traveling even further back in time, after touching 2019, 2001 and 1963 – we wanted to explore even older history and scarcer material. On the other hand, a reflection on the subject matter, As 2025 will mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, we began discussing the most iconic moments of the conflict. For us Europeans and Americans, D-Day felt most relevant. This moment has enormous value for all of us, and is part of the shared and common narrative of how the Allied forces defeated fascism and Nazi Germany. A story that feels very valid today as well.
So we started from these two elements: a theme that we were interested in, and a technology that again takes another leap forward. The story is always what combines these two elements and we found the incredible story of an American photographer soldier who took some of the most iconic footage of D-Day but never opened up about it to his family. The experience will follow the story of his daughter, putting pieces together and progressively discovering the scale of her father’s involvement in these heroic events. It’s an incredibly moving story that really connects past and present.
The big idea of this project is to show how 2D media can pave the way for immersive experiences. We cannot wait to go deeply into the transition and combine these two worlds together.