Music, sound design and interactive sound house Q Department–with flagship headquarters in NY helmed by Drazen and Jacqueline Bosnjak, and an office in L.A. headed by creative director Zack Rice–has extended its reach across the Atlantic, launching a French company with longtime collaborator and sound designer Jean-Baptiste Saint-Pol.
“French directors and production companies are pushing the boundaries of immersive entertainment and that is what drives us creatively,” said Q Department CCO Drazen Bosnjak. “France has a culture that values the arts which really brought the idea of starting a French company into focus.”
Saint-Pol will be president of the French company flanked by Jacqueline Bosnjak as CEO and Drazen Bosnjak as CCO. Elise Barbet will also join the Paris team as a producer. Q Department thus puts in place a production pipeline between North America and Europe.
Saint-Pol, who cut his teeth in the industry working on over 300 videos games as location recorder and sound designer for games like Assassin’s Creed, Call Of Duty, COD Modern Warfare, Splinter Cell Conviction and Bioshock, has been an integral part of Q Department for years. Together they have the helmed sound production on Hollywood VR titles like Oculus’ Emmy-nominated Dear Angelica, 20th Century Fox’s Alien, The Martian, The Last Goodbye, and Unchained, a mixed reality theatre experience, and more.
Q Department has shown an affinity and expertise for transforming compelling moving image projects into fully realized, engrossing worlds audiences can inhabit. Antoine Cayrol, co-founder of Atlas V, the visionary French immersive media company, said of Q Department, “They have dramatically established themselves as the go-to-studio for interactive sound projects that push the boundaries of storytelling in new mediums like VR, AR and XR.”
Q Department has turned out iconic commercial campaigns like the Droga5 Hennessy films and many high-profile projects that work hand in glove with Mach1, the sound technology company they founded which notably powers Bose as well as many exceptional collaborations with directors and artists like Marco Brambilla, Derek Cianfrance, Ridley Scott, Danis Tanovic, Sam Esmail and Malik Sayeed.
Among the first notable French interactive sound projects from Q Department’s new European venture is a collaboration with photographer-author Mustapha Azeroual, that will debut at the Jeu de Paume. The arts center for modern and postmodern photography and media will welcome the exhibition “Image 3.0” with sound creations using a wide range of digital resources.
Q Department also recently worked with Gobelins, the French animation school that is known for breeding the next generation of storytellers, to design their spatial audio program that uses the Mach1 Spatial System.
