Genius Interview: Chloé Rochereuil
Posted on Sep 19, 2024 by FEED Staff
Chloé Rochereuil is an Emmy-nominated, multi-award-winning director who uses immersive and interactive technologies to craft compelling non-fiction stories. She is a co-founder and CCO of Targo, an award-winning company that stands at the forefront of entertainment in the immersive age – which is known for its novel, innovative approach to storytelling. She joins FEED to talk all about Targo and relay her thoughts on an industry-wide shift towards interactive content.
FEED: Tell us about your career and what got you into the industry?
CHLOÉ ROCHEREUIL: I’m currently the chief creative officer at Targo, but my background is in journalism. I studied social sciences, specialising in journalism.
My career began as a journalist for the French version of Mashable, which is a tech website. I co-founded Targo when I was at university seven years ago, with my friend and long-time business partner Victor, meaning what I’ve achieved at Targo has made up the majority of my career. Currently, I’m responsible for all the creative aspects of the company as well as being a speaker and teacher.
I have directed over ten award-winning immersive documentaries, and two of them got nominated for Emmys. What we’re trying to do is really push the limits of storytelling and technology and what can be achieved in the entertainment space within VR and MR headsets.
On the subject of Targo, how did it come about and what does it do?
We are a studio specialising in creating immersive documentaries. My co-founder Victor went abroad to the US in 2015, when VR was new; it was something nobody really knew or understood.
I remember the first time I used VR was with him. He showed me a 360 video of the Eiffel Tower with this cardboard headset you put your phone inside – and it felt amazing.
His goal was really to make these immersive technologies accessible to wider audiences. We both agreed that using these technologies as a medium to tell stories was the best way.
As a journalist, I was excited by the idea that I could actually bring people with me to experience what I’m encountering on the field first-hand. We started Targo with that idea.
We started off mostly producing 360 video for major media outlets like The New York Times, Al Jazeera, USA Today etc. It was just turning your phone around at that stage, but it was something new to experience and it’s how we really started to craft our own stories. Then, as more and more people started to have a VR set at home, it began to become easier to distribute our experiences.
The first big project was one we didn’t realise would be significant until later. We filmed inside Notre-Dame cathedral about three months before the fire. When the cathedral was destroyed, we had incredible images of how it was before. We realised that VR was a powerful medium to capture and allow people to time travel.
The second key project was on cities during lockdown, because we realised that these were historically significant moments. Tokyo, Paris and Jerusalem were all completely empty, and we felt we had to film that. VR was the only way we could capture the true essence of those completely empty cities. Those two documentaries got Primetime Emmy nominations back in 2020 – and that’s where it started to get bigger and bigger. We’ve done a lot of productions since then.
Our main goal with Targo is to create stories and artistic experiences everyone wants to watch, similar to something you might find on Netflix. Accessibility to everyone is our main focus.
What are some of the main ingredients for creating a compelling immersive story?
At Targo, we create two kinds of experiences. The first ones are the immersive videos – 360° or 180° videos. The other kind are real-time experiences, and for these we aim for photorealism, which can be challenging with VR headsets because we are trying to utilise photogrammetry and laser scans. When you’ve got a VR headset, you’re limited with resources you can use in real time. So it’s tricky, but it’s very interesting too. What I like when using these kinds of technologies is that there are no rules – it’s like a blank page where you can write anything you want, which is key as a creator.
Choosing the right topic is definitely the first thing you need to focus on when you are a VR or immersive creator. Not all topics work – some work better for podcasts, TV or a website – and they don’t need to be made in VR because then it can become a gimmick in some way. A lot of other experiences have been produced without necessarily thinking specifically about what the technology is actually bringing to the topic, and as a result VR’s reputation can suffer somewhat.
I think the second aspect is that VR is really powerful in connecting you with people. All of our documentaries are history-based, focusing on one story or interviewee that’s lived through incredible stories. What it does manage is to create empathy – they become a proxy for the experience. They are the ones that take your hand and bring you inside those highly visual environments.
Comfort is also really important, being careful with movement when guiding the viewer through the experience, using specific storytelling tools and editing techniques.
What are some of your favourite projects you΄ve worked on, and why?
Behind the Dish was very interesting. It’s a series about three female chefs in Japan, the US and France. We look at their careers as female chefs in a male-dominated industry. It’s also a world tour of culinary tradition because it takes you through all these different places.
We originally couldn’t do the topic of food in VR because, when you’re filming with a 360 camera, you can’t zoom – so the dishes would have appeared distant and you wouldn’t be able to capture all the details and texture of the food. So we decided to create a custom rig that alters the distance between your eyes, essentially providing you with the view that you would have as an insect, in that the dishes appear enormous in front of you. It is such a new and exciting way to experience food.
The 9/11 documentary was also a particularly poignant one. It tells the story of Genelle Guzman-McMillan, who survived for 27 hours under the rubble of Ground Zero. It was challenging as we didn’t want to show anything violent, so you dive into her memories of the attacks surrounded by a blurry halo that doesn’t depict anything graphic. The experience is divided into three parts: the first is her genuine experience as a young immigrant in New York City, starting to work at the Twin Towers in the early 2000s. Then you experience her memories of 9/11 and it concludes with her returning to Ground Zero for the first time around 20 years later.
The most incredible thing was finding out about photographers using VR back in the early 2000s. It was amazing to see people were already using this technology. We obtained the original photos, remastered them and made them compatible with today’s VR headsets.
What’s interesting is that it’s not a 3D recreation of the Twin Towers, but rather a picture taken on that day. These are real people immortalised on a specific day, which creates a special connection to the moment. It was the first time we realised VR is a powerful tool to take people back in time. It’s also an interesting perspective on the evolution of immersive media, you realise people were experimenting with the same thing as you 20 years ago.
Could you share your thoughts on the current trends surrounding the immersive media space – and if the media and entertainment industry is fully ready to embrace it?
I think Meta Quest is more game orientated, whereas the Apple Vision Pro is more focused on entertainment – even the way it was promoted showed people sitting passively on a couch consuming content.
It’s interesting to see those two visions of how you can use a VR headset. The reality of the market is it’s mostly gamers; it’s hard as an entertainment company to push narrative content because we know that all the daily users are gamers.
Mixed reality makes it easier and cheaper to produce content because you don’t have to create a full 360 environment, which reduces cost.
Targo has just released a new Apple Vision Pro app called Through Their Lenses. Can you tell us about that and your thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro?
We released a first demo on the Vision Pro on 6 June for the anniversary of D-Day, and the full version is still in development. The experience tells the story of three photographers who captured the initial assaults on Omaha Beach, which was the deadliest battleground during D-Day.
It’s a mixed-reality experience where you dive into the photos taken on that day. We developed a unique pipeline that allowed us to remaster old, grainy pictures and transform them into incredible spatial scenes. To achieve this, we used AI tools to upscale the image quality and perform stereoscopic conversion, alongside the work of 3D artists.
It’s amazing to see how technology can breathe new life into these old forms of media. And it’s also a really powerful way to understand the moment, by experiencing and creating your own memories of what happened. From the educational perspective, it’s incredible. For an entertainment company that’s working in the immersive space, the Vision Pro is something we’ve been anticipating for a long time, because it targets the kind of audience that we’re trying to hit. It really aligns with our goals – as a company that’s pushing for mainstream topics in VR – and technologically we have seen it’s a very powerful tool.
Still, the price tag is huge and it will take time to reach larger regions, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
Could you talk to us about JFK Memento and how that came about?
JFK Memento was the big brother of the D-Day project, produced on Meta Quest. It’s a 40-minute, fully interactive experience. You can walk inside rooms rather than being stuck in a 360 sphere. This was an interesting project because it basically does the same thing we did for D-Day, except on a larger scale.
It takes you back to November 1963 in the hours following the assassination of President Kennedy. To recreate those events and those hours, we created digital twins of the historic locations as they were in 1963, using archives and resources to make sure they were exactly the same. It was the first event to be broadcast on live TV, which meant there were hours and hours of footage to work through.
We break the frame of the archive and reproject the images onto digital twins of the historical locations. Within the headset, you experience these pictures in a new spatial way: history becomes a place you can visit.
The story is narrated by those who experienced it, so the witnesses, the detectives, journalists and relatives. You connect with those people and enter their memories of that day. A lot of them have passed away since the documentary was made, so it was important we captured their testimonies and made them available for future generations in a very vivid way.
What does the future hold for the immersive tech space, in the context of broadcast and film?
As a company creating immersive entertainment, we believe the future of entertainment is spatial.
We’re living in a spatial world already, everything around us being 3D, not flat. It doesn’t really make sense that we are watching a flat, limited screen.
I think it’s important to mention that I don’t feel like XR is going to replace other media. We still go to the cinema despite having TVs at home. We still listen to podcasts and read articles. The fact we are creating new things with new technologies doesn’t mean we are going to erase other media forms. I think XR will coexist with other kinds of media.
There’s also still a hardware issue because we need those headsets to be cheaper and lighter and able to integrate more seamlessly into our daily lives.
I think a spatial future isn’t something that’s necessarily bad or scary. We are all glued to our phones and computers all day long as it is – and although headsets are still technology, they won’t ever replace real life.
What we are trying to do is offer people things they couldn’t do in their normal lives, to go back in time to inaccessible places and meet extraordinary people. The goal is not to replace reality, but to make it better.
This feature was first published in the Autumn 2024 issue of FEED.
