StoryFutures: Gateway Cluster Partnership for Audiovisual Digital Creativity

The stories of tomorrow will reach audiences in new and complex ways, fuelled by immersive technologies, data-driven personalisation, smart devices and AI alongside evolutions in contemporary screen form. Screen industries' creative story processes, techniques, business models, value networks and workflows are thus challenged to iterate a next generation of storytelling that can engage audiences in novel and commercially viable experiences.
We span screen and createch industries, converging world leaders in storytelling, including Double Negative, Punchdrunk, nDreams, Sony, Pinewood, BBC Worldwide, HTC Vive and the BFI, to work alongside SMEs. We match these with academic expertise traversing story form (Media, Gaming, Drama); audience behaviour (Psychology); business models (Management); production cultures (Media); hardware, software and user interfaces (Engineering, Comp Sci, Design), to facilitate R&D that will create innovative and compelling content, products and service for emerging creative technologies. StoryFutures will grow both screen and createch industries. Led by an innovative StoryLab model, we work across 4 themes: T1 StoryLab; T2 Value Networks; T3 Data in the Creative Workflow; T4 Audience Engagement.
Our StoryLab (T1) provides expertise and space for collaborative approaches to creative challenges that are barriers to business growth, such as how to increase user comfort in VR, build social immersive experiences or novel exploitation of existent IP. It will operate at professional and student level, spanning FE, HE and CPD, training a next generation of storytellers and entrepreneurs in world-class creative content and products. StoryLab will develop, fund and support prototype and risky innovations in story form that tackle such challenges, providing SMEs with new business opportunities and access to further funding and mentoring (T2). SF's R&D programme links these innovative productions with R&D on the effective management of data in the creative production pipeline, enabling more efficient and creative workflows (T3). And, via our partner distribution platforms (HTC, Heathrow, BFI, Sky VR), tests next gen experiences with audiences in novel ways that produce rich understandings of their engagement, including cognitive and neurological responses linked to a long-range analysis of youth audiences' preferences in these new spaces (T4). Across this work we will grow revenues and jobs in our region and beyond.
With over £6.7m in leverage funding, SF is led by Royal Holloway together with its industry partners and HEIs, Brunel, NFTS and University of Creative Arts. SF spans film, television, gaming and immersion across a regional cluster that forms a gateway in and out of London. It will connect the film studios in the region's north to Guildford's gaming in the south, across to the west's plethora of createch companies and back to London's intensity of creative industries (see map). The cluster thus emphasises the region's - and UK economy's - fusion of digital and creative skills, with such companies likely to be 'more productive and have higher growth rates than [those] located entirely in one discipline' (Bazalgette 2017: 14). The region contains nearly 20% of the UK's high concentration, high growth creative Travel to Work Areas, forming the highest proportion of creative jobs and businesses outside of London. Within the cluster Heathrow constitutes "a critical driver of the area's economy" (TVBerkshire, 2017) as well as a gateway to the global markets and audiences that our innovative products and services must reach. SF will address a significant challenge for the UK creative economy in sustaining creative conurbations that have the potential for 'higher levels of business productivity' than Creative Cities (Nesta, 2016: 6). The Gateway Cluster thus has potential to form a powerhouse akin to the 'Golden Triangle' of medical research, industrial collaboration and innovation to its immediate north.

SF has significant potential to support economic growth, innovation and value creation in the screen and creative technology industries at regional, national and international levels. It will tap un-explored creativity across a conurbation that spans screen industries and createch, reaching over 24,000 businesses. We will boost the £349m 2012-18 TTWAs' R&D spending that is currently below London levels, with every £1 R&D spend likely to lead to 20% increase p.a. of private sector R&D output (Haskel 2014).
We provide SF Partners and SMEs within the cluster with an architecture for innovative R&D, enabling product, content and experience development otherwise too risky. StoryLab (Theme 1) will broker collaborations across sectors to generate new market opportunities and provide participants with brand exposure on national/international platforms to facilitate further investment or sales opportunities. T4 audience research will provide insight for further development and investment. We link these insights to technological form, providing narrative engineering solutions to technical barriers that restrain creative innovation. We will develop workflow tools (T3) that are more efficient, enabling cost-savings and enhancing creative collaboration to foster innovation. Across our work packages, T2's R&D on value networks will provide companies with support for business growth via mentoring, funding applications, analysis of business needs, routes to finance and international export. T2 also provides network infrastructural support, including building and enhancing innovation nodes across the cluster. SF will provide a wider understanding of the creativity of conurbations to act as a blueprint for nationwide growth, producing 155 R&D projects, 20% increase in funding success, 55 jobs and reach over 1m audiences.
R&D will benefit policy stakeholders, trade bodies and networks nationally via reports, showcases, and network events to ensure companies outside the cluster gain insight to support innovation for competing at global scale in next gen story form and products. Our StoryLab will tackle industry wide challenges, offering national bodies research to guide and grow memberships. Policymakers (Ofcom, DCMS) will gain insights and recommendations on opportunities/barriers/models for future growth to inform industrial policy as well as audience behaviours and ethics to inform regulation. Locally we will have direct impact by investing in creative and digital business, including innovation funding for companies and providing increased incubation and scale-up space.
SF will have lasting impact via its focus on education and skills. It responds to industry emphasis on collaborative problem-solving and soft-skills, increased diversity and the need to teach creativity in conjunction with data skills and STEM to STEAM. Via HEIs that operate at FE, UG, PGT and CPD level we will create a talent pipeline to benefit the region's and nation's economy. We will also develop a 'next generation' of researcher, spanning industry and academia, via our support for PhD studentships and PDRA training. Our commitment to sustainability of the cluster will thus treat AHRC grant as seed funding for SF's growth, utilising a capped revenue share on StoryLab projects to return future successes for further innovation challenge funding, whilst grant applications to both commercial and public bodies are a key R&D activity. Significant investment in infrastructure, including a new building at RHUL, will continue SF activities beyond the funding period, whilst our dynamic and flexible project architecture allows short, medium and long-term benefits for partners who may come into contact with the R&D partnership at different points in its life cycle. Finally, the general public will gain new kinds of viewing experiences as well as a skilled and more diverse workforce that can ensure the UK's continued leadership in innovative and market-able story form and content.