The café of images
Project for innovative post-confinement film distribution via QR Codes stuck on coffee tables. Project for innovative post-confinement film distribution via QR Codes stuck on coffee tables. Project for innovative post-confinement film distribution via QR Codes stuck on coffee tables.
New social uses
At café terrace tables, after the confinement, the cards for choosing your beer, tea or menu are replaced by QR Codes. People approach their phone to the QR Code, then immediately look at the card together on their personal mobile screen. No problem, the use is fluid, the technology is well developed and has been integrated in phones for a long time (for train tickets for example).
What if, instead of the card in the café-restaurant, it was a short film that was shared on the phone? What if this café was a movie theater, on a terrace on the sidewalk? What if it was a space for short films, trailers, quizzes where you have to guess who the actress or actor is? What if the QR Code on each small table became an open window on projects of mediation with cinema, which are qualitative, playful and participatory?
Technical implementation
A QR Code is a simple shortcut to a “URL” (the address of a web page, or a video or audio file). There is no technical cost of implementation, the conversion between the url and the QR Code can be done by any site of the domain, such as https://fr.qr-code-generator.com/.
For example this address: https://www.benoitlabourdette.com/ will always give, whatever the site used, this same QR Code (you can test it with your phone) :
Specific mediation work
This proposal is a “frame”, just as a movie theatre is a “frame”. Within this framework, it is necessary to invent activities and adapted mediations. These can be very well framed, or more flexible, like the “cafés philo” for example.
Technical work
You can simply put a film behind a QR Code, but you can also send, in the same QR Code, a different film every 10 minutes to make a real programming, via a unique QR Code. Depending on the chosen mediation proposal, the technical work to make the activity exist can be extremely simple (it can be just doing the QR Code for a video on YouTube for example) or more sophisticated (a specific platform that changes the film every 10 minutes, or takes the votes, etc.).
Example
In 2015, the QR Code on the beach of Saint Marc sur Mer (where the film “Les vacances de M. Hulot” was shot) offered the viewing of short extracts of the film, shot at the place where the QR was set up, in order to announce the open-air screening of the film at the end of the summer. Young people discovered the film through these excerpts and came to discover it during the screening.
The beautiful holiday : « Mr. Hulot’s Holiday »’s flashcodes.
Singular Mediation Ideas
In this very singular system, new and adapted proposals must be invented. I don’t think we can “cut and paste” a principle of debate, for example.
Here are a few ideas for mediation:
- We change the film every 10 minutes, for a real programming, with different themes.
- The fact that the films are seen together by the people at the table produces a common experience: for example, the common laughter for the comedies will be fully experienced, and people will be able to look at each other, really interact during and after the screenings.
- In the café of a movie theatre, complementary content to the programmed films, “bonuses” (interviews with actors, filmmakers, analyses, etc.) could be broadcast in the QR Codes.
- We could take inspiration from the cafés philo, and use films that set the pace of the evening, to launch a debate on different aspects of a subject.
- A lighter idea, proposed to the cafés and restaurants of a city, could be to create stickers with the QR Code, stuck on the tables with a very short explanatory text, which would be the link to a mini video platform gathering local productions. This platform, following the example of the TikTok application, would directly propose a video, then another video, automatically recommended, with the possibility of subscriptions and customization.
- Quizzes, collective games whose images would be the support: what is the actor’s name? Who is the director of the film? What is the year of the film? Who composed the music?
- More precise themes, such as “Male gauze / Female gauze”, with discussions (short each time) on the perception of an extract of flim, in order to become aware of the stereotypes which the images carry. Work with extracts from heritage films for example.
- Etc.
The name Le Café des images is in honour of a wonderful movie theatre in Hérouville-Saint-Clair, which bears that name.
What is culture for? Are we going to return to cultural places as much as before and for what reasons? Should we rethink cultural proposals to adapt them? But to adapt them to what and how? These are fundamental questions that are posed today and tomorrow to the actors of the cultural field (as well as many other fields). Since the first containment related to the Covid-19 epidemic in March 2020 and during the following two years, many initiatives and remote alternatives have been invented. The cultural practice after Covid-19 is already and will continue to be quite different from the one before. It seems important to me to make innovative proposals to the public, that is to say, adapted, in their form and content, to a new reality.
Culture is a bonding factor, it is the essence of social cohesion, and it has even been proven that it is also an important component of health. Culture is a common good that we share and that builds us. The living culture after the Covid-19 crisis (confinements and other authoritarian legislative incoherence, restrictions of freedom, discriminations, fear of the other, mass manipulation, submission to authority...) will have to be more inclusive, less overhanging, more inventive, more agile, more cooperative, the participation and the place of the people being again in the center of the stakes, and this in the greatest artistic and democratic requirement.
You will find here concrete proposals for cultural actions that are antifragile to crises, often around audiovisual and digital, experimental or already proven, as well as tools for reflection for the “updating” of cultural policies.
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Balance and supports
A method for the sustainability of projects.
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Cinema workshop for absent children in Gonesse
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A proposal for a video production workshop for teenagers in a movie theatre, without initial registration, which was led, through a antifragility (…) -
Build antifragility for cultural projects
Methodological proposal.
What methodology should be adopted to build cultural projects that have the capacity to tame uncertainty and thus become more deeply rooted in (…) -
The café of images
Innovative film distribution proposal.
Project for innovative post-confinement film distribution via QR Codes stuck on coffee tables. Project for innovative post-confinement film (…) -
Towards the cultural experience
Essay, by Emmanuel Vergès
In the construction of cultural proposals, focus attention on the lived and shared experience. Short essay on the philosophy of action and the (…) -
Pedagogical use of the “By my window” platform
Cooperative cultural activity for educational purposes.
Exploit the video platform “By my window” in the pedagogical field during and after lockdown: reweave links and learning through shared (…) -
Moving screenings to reweave the link between the theatres and their spectators
Post-confinement cultural action project.
Itinerant projections on city walls, in the neighbourhood around a cinema, to experience again the happiness of shared projection, without any (…) -
“Distances”: a look at a new situation (ocim)
Resources
The Ocim (Observation Cooperation Museum Information) proposes the sharing of reflections of professionals from the museum world to invent the (…) -
Tutorials for doing video activities with your children
Podcast by Benoît Labourdette (1’37s, 2020).
Very simple tutorial (1 minute 30) to conduct two creative audiovisual activities with your children.During the confinement period in (…) -
Tutorials for making sequence-shot films
Podcast by Benoît Labourdette (17’30s, 2020).
Complete pedagogical method for making three types of films in sequence shot: collective film, animated film, memory at the window.During the (…)
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Personal inventories Collective film (7’17s, 2019).
The vision, the hearing, the framing, the screens, the contemporary audiovisual practices... when it is the objects themselves that speak about it! -
No picture on screen A film by Benoît Labourdette ( 2’54s , 2015).
The mystery of physiological processes at work in a movie theater. -
Passeurs d’images: Interactive Cinema Session Corporate films
As part of the launch of the new national coordination Passeurs d’images, I proposed an “interactive cinema session”. Come in, ladies and (…) -
Online training course: “Short film, digital and 21st Century: new media, new uses, new paths”. 43rd Grenoble Open Air Short Film Festival : film analysis course.
The Grenoble Open Air Short Film Festival always starts with a two-day course. For the 43rd edition of the festival in 2020, the workshop is (…) -
Create a DCP for theatrical screening Tutorial for a professional practice
The DCP (Digital Cinema Package), is the “digital file format” specific to projection in cinemas (since the disappearance of 35mm film copies in (…)