- August 1, 2024
- Read time: 3 mins
Culture shapes who we are. Narratives give us an identity. Identity gives us direction. New technology pushes us closer to the story worlds we have always imagined. This is the context that guides our work. Stories in any form provoke action, shift our perception of the world, and help us empathise with the collective. Yet, are we standing at the end of the creative industries, or the start of a whole new frontier?
But have you ever sat down in front of a screen, knowing deep down what kind of imaginary or documentary-style story you wanted, only to drift into mindless scrolling instead? Constantly amazed by the sheer volume of content, yet unable to find anything that reaches you on a more meaningful level. We have.
Video games, augmented reality, VR, film, television; the list of formats and stories on offer is endless. So why is it still so hard to feel satisfied? Technology has never advanced faster, yet the connection between creators and audiences feels thinner and more fragile than ever. These thoughts surfaced for us long before AI tools became commonplace or before terms like AI slop entered the conversation.
In the AI-infused times of today, we use these terms to blame the technology for the decline of high-quality, original content, but technology has always been part of storytelling. Each era has pushed back against the technological changes to the creative workflow and output of form.
That is not to say there has not been a shift in aesthetic. Every innovation came with resistance, excitement, and reinvention. The creation of the camera transformed fine art. The arrival of movie cameras and recorded sound shifted cinema from silent films to talkies. Digitisation reshaped the entire film aesthetic. Online content platforms encouraged personalisation as algorithms began choosing what we should watch. Cloud computing turned games into live services that communities returned to daily and yearly.
Each development appeared to promise greater democratisation, although in hindsight one gatekeeper often replaced another. Every era created new decision makers who determined what was funded and what reached the public. This is not a criticism, simply a pattern in how the creative form became an industry.
Technology has, and in many ways is bringing us closer to personalisation; a never-ending personalised story with the human at the centre. The big question is whether we will embrace our own reality or one shaped entirely by what algorithms or the gatekeepers feed us.
Creating story worlds is older than language itself, yet put a group of creatives together from different specialisations and the divide becomes clear. One story language rarely translates neatly into another. How do you explain a virtual production lighting schema in Unreal Engine to a gaffer or DOP? How does a scriptwriter convey the subtext of a line to a director who sees the moment differently? Is this even required, or is this, in fact, part of creative collaboration and the sharing of perceptions?
So why found a lab and a studio now? Because frustration eventually turned into curiosity. So much content felt hollow, predictable, or disposable. We kept moving between platforms searching for something with meaning. That is when we realised the problem was not the technology at all. There has never been a better time to take a risk and build an entity that explores novel ways in which narrative and technology augment side by side. Are we the only one in this space? Absolutely not, but we think we have something to offer, be it big or small, to the industry we love.
Our company is beginning at the point where formats, humans, and machines converge. It started with an idea and a dissertation, not a product. Supplemented with many moments of pitching that idea. As a founder with decades of experience as an on-set script technician, in government, and inside one of Australia’s largest archive libraries as a content producer, it became clear that personalised IP steps over format and gives us all a sense of place. Pitching the concept behind the company was preparation for what comes next and offered a valuable temperature check of the industry.
After a pause, the collective team started to emerge. We returned to a simple question. What if we built the creative tools that we had always been searching for? What if we architect spaces where the unheard feel safe, seen, and valued? What if we invited audiences to step inside experiences shaped by bespoke open-source technology, narrating, augmenting, and expanding its functionality the same way in which we imagine a novel or world out of words on a page? Our goal is to do this with playfulness, adaptability, and the realisation that any failures lead to new pathways. We do this while acknowledging the biases and inequalities that have existed since storytelling became a business.
We’ve chosen to build a business where creativity leads technology, not the other way around. A place where stories are crafted for people, not squeezed into algorithmic moulds. A place where innovation is defined by resonance and what it can offer to the unheard and emerging voice. Starting this company meant letting go of the belief that the world does not need another studio, creative business or lab. What the world needs is intention: a voice that signals when something is out of balance.
At Screen Innovate, we champion diversity, innovation, and gender equality. We celebrate curiosity and embed it into everything we make. Stay tuned and meet the team that’s growing, and what comes next as we explore next-generation narratives, and living stories shaped from the bottom up with machine and human intelligence.