WHAT WE DO
We focus on storytelling, UX design, and the creative challenges of immersive narrative worlds, knowledge transfer, international networking, and enriching interdisciplinary collaboration.
The DEVELOPMENT LAB hosts participants and internationally acknowledged mentors and creators from all over Europe and worldwide. Packed with intense expert sessions and masterclasses, you will find a safe space to learn, explore, experiment and collaborate – in a non-competitive, multi-disciplinary, creative environment, where you develop ideas, level up your storytelling skills, start new projects and make friends with the European VR family.
Learn how to master the new grammar of immersive storytelling. Ideate and develop a project with fellow participants from all over Europe and share your professional insights as an artist, a creator. Benefit from our alumni network and become part of the European XR family!
Join us and spend five days of creative explosion in Villeurbanne / Lyon in the South of France.
LOCATION
Based in the Greater Lyon area, in France, Pole PIXEL is a 30 000 m2 creative industries hub dedicated to the development of cinema, audiovisual, digital arts and video game companies. Run by a non-profit organization, Pole PIXEL provides different kinds of office solutions (from coworking spaces to closed offices and independent working spaces), a development program, and a large panel of networking events and workshops. On site, Pole PIXEL has movie making studios, equipment rental companies, post production companies, virtual production studios, and around 120 companies of all sizes, from startups to international companies from the world of gaming, audiovisual, immersive technologies.
FOR WHOM?
We address everyone curious and creative! XR producers and creators, creative technologists, filmmakers, scriptwriters, performing artists, fine artists, game developers, journalists, communication professionals from the fields of marketing and advertising, museum and arts curators, lecturers, storytellers, film or stage directors.
Participation is without own project
SCHOLARSHIPS
We provide a small number of scholarships. Following the specifications of Creative Europe Media, citizens with the following nationality are eligible to apply:
Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Republic of Serbia,Slovakia and Ukraine.
Scholarships are freed from participation fee. Beneficiaries will be selected by jury’s decision. There is no legal claim for a scholarship, even if you are one of the eligible nationalities.
For French residents, this training is eligible under the Qualiopi quality standard through the entitlement to training. For more information or to find out how your costs can be covered – especially if you have a disability – please contact formation@polepixel.fr
Early Bird Deadline: | 22.03.2023, 12 am CET |
Regular Deadline: | 16.04.2023, 12 am CET |
Lab Dates: |
online masterclasses between 29.5. and 5.6. (tba) |
Your Travel Dates: | 08. – 14.06.2023 |
Duration: | 3 online masterclasses 5 days on-site lab fulltime in Villeurbanne (Lyon), PolePixel |
Participation Fee: |
Early Bird Application 850,00 € +VAT |

WE ARE PROUD TO WELCOME AND WORK WITH:

Nikolaj Stausbøl (Staus) (DK) is a future experience designer with a focus on anchoring playful interactive stories into reality. His projects has a tendency to lean towards emulating photorealism w. volumetric capturing and shader work pipelines and anything that allows for a near realtime dialogue with code and digital creativity; Node based tools, generative AI storytelling, algorave live-coding, etc. As a Creative Technology Director and Partner at Manyone, he’s build numerous large scale XR and spatial projects for both large corporate clients and cultural institutions. His work has been exhibited at Venice Film Festival, SXSW, Copenhagen Contemporary, Las Vegas and United Nations Climate Assembly in Kenya to name a few.

Danish director, David Adler, works with virtual reality and film. In his work he mixes an array of media, aesthetics and technology, always with a strong narrative structure and artistic expression. Experimentation plays a central role in his experiences, he pushes the limits for what kinds of stories can be told in VR and alternative media while ensuring that they are situated in a larger artistic context.
Central to his experiences is the audience presence and relationship to the character in the story evoking awareness and empathy through their involvement. There is a harshness and poetry to his work that often revolve around historical events.
His latest narrative VR experience “End of Night”, tells the story of a jewish man’s escape from Copenhagen during the Second World War, the entire story is experienced from the row boat he escapes in as you sail through the scattered landscape of his memories of that fateful night. “End of Night” won Best Narrative at the Venice Film Festival in 2021 as well as several awards from festivals around the world.
His projects under development span across various countries, for example Bhutan, Greenland and Ghana. He uses a variety of media: a fully immersive VR movie, a VR documentary and a feature length film. David Adler’s style of storytelling embraces using experimentation as a key part of development in order to challenge the narrative structure and ensure a constant stream of narrative elements to bring the story to life.