We were lucky to catch up with Lucas Millet recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lucas, thanks for joining us today. Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?

If I had to go back in time, I would say that the seed for my business was first planted when I was a kid, and discovered a love for the arts : film, literature, music, painting. As I discovered that mankind had created amazing works of art, it enlivened a great desire to create in me.

Founding Harmonik Pictures, a creative agency, was therefore a necessary means in order to create the conditions which would enable me to give myself to my creative impulse.

The agency itself has been growing organically, step by step. I started as a freelancer photographer/videographer. But very soon, I realized that the filmmaking industry was too complex and demanding for a one-man-band to create great pieces of work. I quickly felt limited, and studying how other people created great films, I realized I needed to build a team, and to collaborate with technicians and artists. I also realized that good pieces of work required a certain amount of budget. Therefore, my freelancing career evolved naturally into founding a creative agency.

When you create a company, it can feel like you go on a crusade, and you constantly have to advance on multiple fronts for your ship to keep sailing :

– finding strong collaborators
– constantly working on strengthening your digital presence (website, social medias…)
– constantly brainstorming on strategies to attract good clients (market research, client outreach…)
– making sure your infrastructure is solid (accounting, legal aspects…)
– and of course, you need to keep on providing a top-quality service to your existing clients

I still feel that we are in the early early stages of our business. Although we already achieved great strides for a two-years old creative agency.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

If you take a few step back from our service, you’ll see that we are a small but determinant cog in the great machine that is the communication industry.

Our client’s basic need is to communicate to their audience a message. The nature of this message differs from client to client. It may sometimes be an informative-message on the nature of their new product ; sometimes an identity-message to inform their audience on who they are, what are their values and their philosophy ; sometimes an image-message which will rely solely on design and visual aspects… Often, the message they want to adress to their audience is complex and multi-fold.

We come in when the strategy of communication has already been laid out (audience identification, media plan, data analysis, persona creation, claim and reasons to believe…), and our client needs to turn this message into a captivating story. And this requires a creative mind. We need to start by acquiring a deep understanding on the strategy, in order to imagine a creative content that is very aligned with it.

We produce the content that constitutes the decisive link between our client and their audience, between our client and the world. Although this constitutes a single phase in the long chain of the communication work-process, it is a key link. If it lacks in substance and value, the entire communication structure falls down. And all the time and money the client has invested in their campaign goes out the window. So it is absolutely crucial.

And the creative service is a very rare commodity. Let me rephrase that, a quality creative service is a rare commodity. As influential and groundbreaking artists don’t appear often in human societies, it is the same for the creative industry. Because the quality of our service does not only depend on a professionalism and knowledge, which, with experience, anybody can acquire. The core of our activity depends on a single factor : imagination. And this is not something you can acquire. It is a gene you are born with. And in a world where everything can be learned, deconstructed, analyzed, produced, true imagination is such a precious quality.

Here are a the key virtues which are required to successfully respond to our client’s needs :

– listening : before turning on your imagination, you first need to open your mind and take in everything your clients tells you, in order to have a deep understanding of what their needs are.
– courage : when you start imagining campaign concepts, you have to be bold. You have to think outside the box. You have to challenge the expectations of your client and broaden their imaginative horizons.
– taste : when you create, you are faced with an infinity of options, direction at every step of the way. It can a lot of times be overwhelming. Connecting to your taste intuitively tells you what is beautiful from what is grosse and heavy.
– pragmatism : your creative instincts have to be balanced by a pragmatic perspective. Especially in the film industry, where the costs can quickly add up. That’s why at the heart of every project, the imagination of the art director has to be coupled with the realism of the producer.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I’d say top-quality collaborators, which are specialists in their crafts. The audiovisual industry is full of people who do a bit of everything. It’s rarer and rarer to find individuals who are solely dedicated to their specific craft : a sound designer, an assistant camera, a location manager… If I knew that early enough, we could have created a stronger team earlier and thus produced better works.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

It’s going to sound quite ordinary, but I think any artists will agree with me on this one : freedom. When you’re an artist, your basic need is to have enough space and freedom to express your voice, your talent, your imagination. And working as a creative, living a free life is the condition for me to produce quality work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://harmonikpictures.com/en
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harmonikpictures/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/96224486/admin/feed/posts/?feedType=following
• Other: https://vimeo.com/harmonikpictures