An Interview with Hugues Sweeney, executive producer of interactive production with ONF/NFB Montreal, on successful strategies for international coproductions

1. HUGUES SWEENEY (onf/nfb)
Strategies
for INTERNATIONAL COPRODUCTIONs

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part 1 of an interview with
HUGUES SWEENEY
Executive Producer Interactive media
onf/NFB Digital Studio Montreal

3. Hugues Sweeney is head of French-language interactive media production at the
ONF/National Film Board of Canada, based in Montreal. Sweeney's recent
production credits include the webdocs, The Devil’s Toy Remix (2014), My Tribe
Is My Life (2011), an online interactive web art work, Bla Bla (2012), & Rouge au
carré (2012), an interactive web-based response to the 2012 Quebec student
protests. Multiplatform works include, A Journal of Insomnia (2013), a webdoc &
installation on insomnia, inspired by the lack of sleep Sweeney experienced in
the summer of 2009, when he and his wife were up nights with their newborn
daughter, and the web/installation/mobile work, Barcode (2011).
In 2012, he was president of the jury of the 18th edition of the Concours
Boomerang, honouring the best advertising and interactive websites by Quebec
companies. From 2000 to 2007, he was head of Radio-Canada’s Bande à part, a
multi-platform project to promote Canadian independent music. Hugues was
then head of programming at Espace Musique from 2007 to 2009. He studied
philosophy at the Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology in Ottawa and
multimedia at Université du Québec à Montréal.
who is HUGUES SWEENEY?

4. Right now Canada is viewed around the globe as a great place for interactive
and cross-platform production.
!
The ONF/NFB has a number of ongoing partnerships, with ARTE for example,
where first the ONF takes the lead, then ARTE. And, with trilingual projects like
Fort McMoney, you’re working with multiple national partners, French and
German.
!
Do you have any tips, guidelines or insights for international co-productions?
1
HS. [bluntly ] No. [laughs]
It’s an empty space. We [the ONF] been very opportunist with this emptiness. We
have one partnership with ARTE, one with France Télévisions, one with Encuentro
(Argentina), one in discussion in Columbia. So we’re developing very strong
relationships with South America right now. Also with Cartiers de Spectacle in
Montreal for the public installations downtown.

5. cont.
1HS. I don’t do co-productions with producers -that’s the weird thing - my natural
co-producers are broadcasters, sometimes newspapers. We’re in discussion with
the NY Times to do something as well.
!
We’re in a void, a blind spot where we know that if we juxtapose ourselves with
institutions like ourselves we’ll get somewhere we wouldn’t individually. So with
ARTE, we write global agreements and then we do projects inside that agreement.

6. BODY/MIND/CHANGE
coproduction ONF/nfb + ARTE (Fr & GR)
Mobile & interactive installation

7. When developing co-productions is there a discussion as to how you make the
content relevant for different national audiences?2
HS. Yes. Absolutely. ARTE was a co-producer on Fort McMoney and we like
having their editorial input as the universality of the piece was a concern. Insomnia
was not built with partners but it was built with an international mindset of being
relevant for people in Spain or Japan.
I think that today cultures don’t have to be defined in a territorial way, it’s more by
interest and preoccupation. This is what has happened with music in the last
fifteen years, and we have to follow that track. We’re really careful about thinking
about how the audience fits altogether and we make sure that the content is
relevant wherever they are from.

8. How do you manage building components in a partnership? How do you find
working at a distance with co-pro partners? Any tips?3
HS. We do it all the time. If I look at our slate of productions over the next 12
months, almost every project has an international partner linked to it. North/south
is easier to manage, rather than a 6 or 7 hour distance.
There are limits though to digital communication. If we work together for 12
months, we have to see each other 2 times - to have the informal nourish the
formal. Skype can almost do that. For instance, my vis a vis in Vancouver, we
speak every week. Skype makes a big difference vs. email, but we need to work in
physical proximity.

9. BODY/MIND/CHANGE
coproduction ONF/nfb + ARTE (Fr & GR)
interactive multi-player docu-game

10. Being in the same place must be really necessary in the early stages of design,
when you’re exploring possibilities, and where being able to white board or
prototype is crucial. How do you do that at a distance? Do you set up key
meetings at the start?
4
HS. Always with a national partner the idea is to find our project together. What’s
the subject? what’s the treatment of the subject? How do we want to formulate
this in terms of form and experience?
Usually what we do is we lock ourselves up in a room for 2 or 3 days, we find the
subject, find the treatment, some key elements to it, and then the one who is
responsible for it starts working. Then when something takes shape, when the
idea becomes a concept and the concept becomes tangible, we sit down
physically together 4- 5 months down the road, work together for a day or two to
really develop the concept to an experience. Then when it’s 2 minutes to midnight
for making the last important changes, we sit down again to really deliver. So
there’s always 3 meetings.

11. 4HS. The distance also changes the way we develop the project because the
development phase tends to get long. It stretches & you lose the energy because
you can talk about the project an hour here and two hours there. Now at the
critical point at the beginning of development, we prepare very carefully a five day
workshop where we have to complete all of the key artistic and editorial decisions
about the experience. We lock ourselves up in a room with the creators of the
project.
This is what we did with the Argentine project in November. I was the puppet
master of the week and I hid the schedule from the participants so they didn’t
know what was ahead and each time I gave them a task, I gave them a time limit.
There was a screen, a projector and a countdown.
cont.

12. 4HS. They had 30 minutes and they never knew what would be the next step. Half
way through the week they realized they were doing the scenario of the project,
but I never told them that was the goal of the week. I only told them you have to
follow the goals of the workshop. We try to spend the least time possible on
infertile discussions and just ‘do’ instead.
This is a good end result of the distance - you become very efficient and you cut
out all unnecessary discussions. It’s more of a developer approach to do stuff,
eliminate, do stuff, eliminate, do stuff, eliminate. You write the path as you go.
.…

13. BODY/MIND/CHANGE
The Devil’s toy remix
co-production ONF/nfb + ARTE

14. You mentioned there are key components that are decided upon in that phase.
Can you talk more about that?5
HS. We want to bring a concept to a 360 user experience - so at the end you can
tell the story of the experience of one user completely. So you do this here, you
have the web here, you’re asked to this, you do this, you do this, you do this, and
you exit like this, or you do this action afterwards.
We define the look and feel of all the platforms. We try to shape the workshops
around the nature of the project. So if the project is highly participatory, we spend
a lot of time on the audience. Often the content, the editorial, the experience will
emerge from our perception of the audience

15. How do you manage building components in a partnership? How do you find
working at a distance with co-pro partners? Any tips?6
HS. We do it all the time. If I look at our slate of productions over the next 12
months, almost every project has an international partner linked to it. North/south
is easier to manage, rather than a 6 or 7 hour distance.
There are limits though to digital communication. If we work together for 12
months, we have to see each other 2 times - to have the informal nourish the
formal. Skype can almost do that. For instance, my vis a vis in Vancouver, we
speak every week. Skype makes a big difference vs. email, but we need to work in
physical proximity.

16. The Projects
Barcode : http://codebarre.tv/en/#/en
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Insomnia : http://insomnia.nfb.ca/#/insomnia
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Megaphone : http://www.megaphonemtl.ca/home
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Fort McMoney : http://www.fortmcmoney.com/fr/#/fortmcmoney
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The Devil’s Toy Remix : http://thedevilstoy.com/en/

17. The Hugues Sweeney CoProduction
interview is released under a NonCommercial
ShareAlike Creative Commons license to be shared,
remixed and expanded non-‐commercially, as long as
you credit the TMC Resource Kit, the creator of the
Case Study, Anthea Foyer and/or Dr. Siobhan O’Flynn,
and license your new creations under the identical
terms.
!
Images from third parties retain original copyright.

18. TMC Resource Kit
info@tmcresourcekit.com
tmcresourcekit.com
the Hugues Sweeney Co-Production
interview was prepared by:
Dr. Siobhan O’Flynn
siobhanoflynn.com @Sioflynn
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