VISION LAB – How to build a sustainable media practice, reach new audiences, and initiate change

Vision Lab
The Vision Lab is a wide-open, deeply personal, challenging, and hands-on workshop for people who desire to develop journalism/film/photography beyond traditional limits, reach new audiences, build a sustainable media practice, and initiate change in the world.
The workshop will cover a wide range of alternative publication and financing strategies for documentary work. It will dive into grant writing, expert status, personal brand, and professional identity. It focuses on the long tail and explores what makes projects connectable to contexts far beyond media. It aims to help you develop your personal and professional vision, projects, and strategies.
In previous versions of the Vision Lab, participants have created linear web documentaries and storyboards; developed ideas on how to build a publication bridge from print, online, and mobile into spatial installations and theatre plays; written proposals and financing plans; and developed concepts for tying individual stories into a larger narrative. Others clarified where they wanted to go professionally, identified new markets and audiences, and built a strategy for reaching them. So, whether you are just starting your career, want to give it a new direction, or looking to take your project to the next level, the Vision Lab is for you.
Program overview
Day 1: Vision. Ideas.
Reaching audiences: Media. Spaces. Live.
First pitch of your idea and questions
Positioning
Day 2: Benefit. Meaning.
Innovative and transformative projects
Why you do it?
Project work
Day 3: Perfect Intro & Universal Question
Funding projects
Perfect Intro & Universal Question
Project work
Day 4: Rich & Famous
Pitching ideas
Grant writing
Cooperation & networking
Project work
Day 5: Free. Independent. Change Agent.
The long tail & publication bridges
Journalist – expert – change maker
Project work
Day 6: Presentation & Starting the Journey
Final presentation
Next steps & getting started
Practical information
Dates
6th – 11th October 2025
Location
Centre national de l’audiovisuel
1B, rue du Centenaire
L-3475 Dudelange
Audience
Professional photographers, professional filmmakers, writers, journalists, photography/audiovisual students.
Languages
English, German
Prices
Normal: 300€
Reduced: 150€ (students, jobseekers, intermittent entertainment workers, self-employed professional artists, on presentation of documentary evidence)
Terms of enrollment
Please send your application with a short description of your questions and what you like to achieve, your biography and links to your work to: formation@cna.etat.lu.
Deadline of application: 5th September, 2025
Max. number of participants: 8
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