StoryFutures Academy is a genuine HEI-Industry collaboration between trainers and producers to develop the storytelling techniques and languages that will shape the future of immersive narrative. Led by the National Film & Television School and Royal Holloway, our bid is founded on research and training knowledge that places storytelling at its heart. We will provide core screen sector talent with the tools, space, creative freedom and cross-sector work structures to unlock the creative and commercial potential of immersive production. Partnered by Sir Lenny Henry, Destiny Ekaragha, Alex Garland, Georgina Campbell and more we will lead a charge of UK creative talent into immersive that embeds diversity into the development of the medium across writing, directing, producing, performance, cinematography, editing, animation and VFX. We will deliver training in action, providing opportunities for creatives to learn through taking part in immersive productions that tackle key creative and technical challenges. We link this to R&D in business model innovation and audience insight that combines electronic engineering, neuro- and cognitive psychology with long-sighted ethnography to provide a catalyst for growth of creative industries. We de-risk immersive production through 4 workstreams that provide £1.25m for collaborative projects with immediate impact: 1. Embedded Placements: Promoting talent development and commercial vitality by enabling placements of screen sector talent on immersive productions for cross sector innovation and work-based learning; 2. Collaborative Co-productions: Co-producing immersive experiences that tackle sector wide creative and technological barriers to growth, upskilling core screen sector workers via access to hands-on learning on live productions that build a cross-sector talent pool; 3. Experimental Labs: R&D-based productions that expose core screen sector talent partners to immersive and push technological and creative boundaries; 4. Developmental Training: Training a next generation of immersive storytellers and trainers that cascades knowledge to HEIs, FECs and industry across the country. We are unique in our industry credibility and relationships. The NFTS was awarded the BAFTA for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema in 2018, and it is the only institution in the UK where industry already invest over £1.5m annually in CPD level training courses, enabling us access and partnership with internationally renowned on- and off-screen talent. Our partners are world-leaders in how story and new technologies combine to produce compelling and novel immersive experiences, including immersive theatre (Punchdrunk), VR (Rewind), gaming (Sony IE), film (BFI), television (Sky VR), advertising (McCann) visual effects (The Third Floor, Double Negative), performance capture (Imaginarium). We bring them together with advanced Original Equipment Manufacturers (Microsoft, Plexus) and sector experts (Digital Catapult) to place story and technology in tandem to explore, research, train and develop cross sector storytelling talent and business models. SFA will create over 60 ICE productions and generate nearly 1,000 direct beneficiaries. It will cascade benefits, insights and opportunities via collaborations with regional partners, including NFTS' base in Scotland alongside TRC Media and UK Games Fund as well as access to nationwide labs via Digital Catapult, and co-production bases in Manchester (McCann) and Yorkshire (BFI). It also gains significant advantage from the economies of scale and access to talent achievable from our Gateway Cluster base with its easy flows of talent and work in and out of London. StoryFutures Academy can make the UK a world-leader in immersive because it has unmatched access to mainstream creative screen sector talent, companies and technologies, allowing it to translate experimentation, training and R&D into tangible economic and creative ROI for the whole of UK Plc.

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.