Three hours outside the classroom, discovering Rennes street art, and letting their creative eye and visual storytelling instincts run free.
Looking at the walls of Rennes in a new light, capturing the visual energy of the street, and then turning it into creative material: that was the challenge taken on by Digital Campus Rennes students in the first year of the Expert in Digital Strategy Master's degree, specializing in Art Direction, during their digital escape on April 25, 2025.
A digital escape is an active, creative form of learning that involves taking a class outside the school walls to capture moments, images, or atmospheres from the outside world.
The goal: Draw inspiration from the real environment and translate it into a digital production. This can take the form of a graphic creation, a TikTok, a photo essay, or a video edit. At Digital Campus Rennes, these out-of-classroom learning breaks help strengthen students' artistic sensibility while letting them experiment with current digital formats and practices.
That day, students weren't in a classroom — they were in the city.
Objective: collect images, textures, atmospheres.
Every tagged wall, every stencil or mural became a terrain for exploration.
The itinerary was not fixed: the idea was to wander, follow one's intuition, and above all, take the time to truly look. This sensory, spontaneous approach, at the heart of the pedagogy at Digital Campus Rennes of the school, encourages future art directors to draw from reality in order to conceive authentic projects that are in tune with contemporary visual codes.
Once the images were captured, it was time for transformation. Students returned to campus for a second key phase: creation. Each collected visual had to be reinterpreted, repurposed, or integrated into a cohesive visual production aligned with their personal artistic direction. For some, this was an opportunity to create a conceptual poster; for others, a narrative moodboard or a typographic composition inspired by graffiti. The exercise challenged them to confront their aesthetic choices against the constraints of raw material, in a productive back-and-forth between the street and the screen.
This digital escape is part of a pedagogical approach where visual experimentation holds a central place. At Digital Campus Rennes, Art Direction is not thought of solely in terms of tools or software. It is lived as a stance, a singular way of looking at the world. The city then becomes an open-air visual laboratory, and every project an opportunity to express an emotion, a message, a commitment. This immersion in Rennes street art helped develop curiosity, the ability to build a visual narrative, and a contemporary image culture rooted in the local environment.
Half a day to break out of the usual frame, to test, observe, and create. That too is what it means to study art direction at Digital Campus Rennes: turning reality into living material to be transformed.