18-year-old Maxime Cabrol has already mapped out his future. A university student, Cabrol is also a drummer and official Snapchat Lens Creator. His lenses often involve Geofilters and encourage users to travel the world and share the journey with their friends.
Perhaps most well-known for his World Flag lens, Cabrol is already making waves in the digital space. I caught up with the French Creator to learn more.
Q: How long have you been using Snapchat? When did you start making your own lenses?
A: I started using Snapchat precisely on June 1st, 2013 and [began] the creation of lenses almost a year ago (in March 2020 at the time of the first confinement in France). Actually, I started in 2017 with a few 2D lenses but for my personal use — I put them all on private.
Q: You’re also a drummer and an economics student — what drew you to Lens Studio?
A: In reality, I am someone who hates being bored and loves to work all the time. I’m always looking to diversify my skills and one day, [hoping] to better focus on digital creation, I discovered Geofilters. In 2017, I started to create Geofilters for several countries and one day on the Reddit of Geofilters, a creator shared one of his lenses. It was obvious that I had to test the lenses.
Q: Do you think of yourself as a musician, a student, or a digital creator first?
A: Good question! I have never asked myself this question, I think first of all I consider myself as a student. But [I do so] in the larger sense, i.e. a student of economics, but [also] a student of digital creation and musical creation because I’ m still learning in all these fields. Why not [call me] a creative student!
Q: Which lens (of ones you’ve made or others) is your current favorite?
A: This is a difficult question! I would say that I like “FlowerMask” by Ryan Schields and “X-Ray Me” by CyreneQ. These are people that inspire me.
Q: What do you like about creating lenses and seeing people use them?
A: I find it super interesting to see the rendering of my creations in style transfer, it gives a second life to my creations. I love to see how people see my lenses: They will use them sometimes in ways I never imagined and it becomes interesting because it allows me to see things that I don’t see as flaws or just [to see] a new perspective.
In the statistics I focus on the number of shares I get, [as] it allows me to see that the users not only liked it but also shared it. It’s obvious that the best part is when they take the time to come and send me a message.

Q: Do you find the ML world intimidating or easy to enter into?
A: At first view, I would say that it is intimidating (because of its hundreds of lines of code), but there is no shame in not knowing anything and wanting to learn. There are many tutorials that allow us not only to learn, but also to reproduce without [completely] knowing how to program.
Myself, I tried to analyze Snapchat’s notebooks to understand how to work each step of the model because I didn’t know anything about it. I would say that it is easy to get into, proof with Fritz AI, [because] a person wishing to do a style transfer, classification, etc. can do it without having done a single line of code.
Q: As a Lens Studio Creator, do you feel the need to make a lot of new lenses all the time or do you prefer to focus on quality over quantity?
A: I don’t feel the need to force myself to make new lenses every day. It is important that the creation of lenses remains a passion and a pleasure and not to be disgusted with it.
I think quality is more important: Focusing on an idea and approaching it from several angles and taking the time to do a lot of tests, deleting and starting over to do something concrete, fun, and original.
Q: Where do you see your career going — how important is it for you to be a digital creator?
A: I’m passionate about finance, [and] I hope I’ll be able to work in the stock market or in [a] bank. But there is no doubt that digital creation will remain in my habits, either in the sense that it is a plan B in case finance is no longer a field I want to work in, or as a complement to my work. But what is certain is that it will remain a passion and entertainment outside of work and studies. But the best case would be to work in finance and at the same time make commercial digital creations.
Q: Do you think Snapchat will only increase in popularity in the future or die off like other social media platforms have?
A: For me Snapchat has a future. It’s part of [the few] social networks that take time before releasing new features (which can be frustrating at times), which makes new things more interesting and thoughtful.
The proof that Snapchat offers interesting features is that other social networks don’t innovate, or hardly innovate, anymore, they just copy/paste [new ideas].
On top of that, Snapchat tries to group several applications into one to create a kind of “super app” which includes a chat, video magazines, games, augmented reality, information, a video carousel, meditation apps, and many more. All of this makes Snapchat have enormous potential now and in the future.

Q: If you had all the time and money in the world, what would be your dream project?
Again, this is a difficult question. My first answer would be a financing project in research centers such as health, education, AR, or even innovation. This would allow for new discoveries in all fields, new jobs, and all that follows.
And my second answer would be to make education available for free all over the world, which would allow populations [to access] better skills, [it would lessen inequality], and would allow the development of many new projects. In short, it would be a project that would allow the improvement of living conditions so that we could develop many projects in many sectors.
But in the sense of digital creation, I would buy equipment and make a group project to implement augmented reality in the streets (which would allow [users] to decorate or advertise in the streets without polluting).
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