Saturday 16 May kicked off with a stimulating pitching session held on the fourth floor of the Palais des Festivals (K Hall). Following a call for projects entitled Cinema and Transmedia, five lucky winners out of the 378 participants had the chance to be presented at NEXT 2015. The selection was made by the teams behind the Cannes Film Market and Cross Video Days, the first professional European event gathering together producers, creators, broadcasters, operators, and people from the technical and advertising industries, dedicated to video on all devices. Its founder, Bruno Smadja, moderated the session, introducing the project each time and asking its creator a range of questions.

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Metamorphoses by Pierre Cattan was the first to be showcased. The project consists of a film and a related app for tablets, aiming to raise awareness about the issue of global warming at a crucial moment for the environment, as a summit focusing on climate change is set to take place in Paris later this year.

It was then A Song for Nola's turn, an online/offline experience involving a film, a mobile game, a graphic novel and a music camp where young people have the chance to write and share real songs. Created by Hasmik Hovhannisyan, this Armenian-Swiss co-production's story follows the supernatural adventures of a teenage rock band, headed by a rebel girl called Nola ("Little Warrior"), who can sense other people's auras.

Afterwards, Charles-Stéphane Roy took to the stage to present VFC, a one-of-a-kind cross-media film experience focusing on musical disorders. Starting with a film in which a female neuroscientist develops music-related Stendhal syndrome, the project evolves into an app that monitors the user's response to music and an app-activated suit.

The second-to-last pitch saw the big-screen chapter of the Dofus franchise, Dofus – Book 1: Julith [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], being presented by Frédéric Puech, of Ankama. Best known in French-speaking countries, the Dofus brand is now heading to theatres with a family film for a large target audience and strong partners, such as Gebeka and Indie Sales.

Lastly, a socially committed project called Gringo closed the session. Written and produced by Torsten Gauger, this 90-minute film follows the hard lives of four children from Brazilian favelas, tackling the differences between the First and the Third Worlds in a soft, child-friendly way. The story also continues in a graphic novel, a game and a discussion platform for kids, where they have to guess where the other children are from via their pictures, thus allowing young people from different worlds to communicate.