VR Pioneer Pierre Friquet Joins LAIR

The Collective @ LAIR today announced the signing of VR pioneer Pierre Friquet to join the content studio’s multi-disciplined team of directors. Brought up in the first generation of VR content creators in 2010, before the current VR boom brought on by Oculus’ acquisition by Facebook in 2014, Friquet has a deep understanding of the technologies and storytelling under the umbrellas of immersion and interactivity (including Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Dome filmmaking).

He has directed more than a dozen VR narratives, documentaries, music videos, and interactive experiences for clients such as ABC, Fox, MTV, UNICEF, and TEDx. His best known projects are his VR experiences “Patterns” and “Jetlag” - the latter winning the Best Live Action Award at the Kaleidoscope VR Festival and the Best Immersion Award at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal. Friquet is fluent in mobile, web, and location-based VR activations, and having lived and worked in four continents, he also understands the cultural variations of these enterprising technologies.

“With Pierre on our team, we hope to demystify VR for our clients and expand our reputation as a content studio armed with any storytelling technique you can name,” comments LAIR Founder and Chief Creative Director Thor Raxlen. “We want to help brands recognise that whether it’s 360 video content on their social platforms or something as basic as Google Cardboard at an event, VR is far more affordable and accessible than they originally anticipated and can tell meaningful and compelling stories.”

Friquet explains: “It’s as Marshall McLuhan famously said: “the medium is the message.” Storytelling is embedded in the technology, so in the design these hyper-real experiences, you must always remember that the content is experienced rather than consumed.”

He continues: “VR is a new frontier not just because it is new technology, but also because the technology opens up a new dimension of immersion, one both primed to capture people’s imaginations and to be a strategic tool for brands, either on its own or as complementary content for existent IP.”