BSAC meeting with Royal Holloway UL’s ‘StoryFutures’ AHRC funding bid team

BSAC are supporting Royal Holloway UL’s bid for Industrial Strategy funding from the AHRC in relation to R&D Creative Clusters. The bid – under the title ‘StoryFutures’ – focuses on next generation storytelling (including through use of immersive technology) and has now been shortlisted to go through to round two of the bid process.

BSAC Members and Associate Members are invited to meet with the bid team to find out about and/or shape a use case of how to test a product with novel audience engagement measures.

This meeting will take place on 28 February 2018.

Partners for the Story Futures bid include world-leaders in creative story form and technology who nevertheless often lack the capacity for the R&D necessary to innovate in the face of the Next Generation storytelling challenge. This manifests itself in a variety of ways for the audiovisual screen industries: (1) how to tell stories in new ways, (2) finding successful business models, (3) designing new workflow processes, (4) engaging audiences as new technologies confront our very conception of the ‘screen’. These partner-defined challenges shape the 4 themes addressed by the Story Futures bid:

Theme 1. Next Generation Story Lab: How do creatives harness emergent and established storytelling forms on new platforms to build new audience relationships?

Theme 2. Emergent value networks: What are the production networks, revenue streams, collaborations, business models and IP opportunities for Next Generation stories?

Theme 3. Data in the Creative Workflow: How can increasing volumes of data/metadata in production be better managed and processed to enable creative opportunities and greater collaboration?

Theme 4. Audience engagement: How can mixed methods form richer understandings of user experiences and needs, such as embodiment, trust, personalisation and ethics?

BSAC is primarily providing input into Theme 4 and the meeting on 28 February will focus on the research design of that theme with particular focus on developing a ‘narrative engineering’ approach to draw together psychology and engineering to test audience engagement. This will include understanding user needs and combining eye tracking, physiological recordings and bespoke questionnaires to provide rich characterisation of audience responses to innovation in storytelling, including responses such as attention, emotion, agency, embodiment and the impact of personalised or collective experiences.