Working in the media sector, you would imagine that Research, Development and Innovation (RD&I) would be central to every business, what with creatives always being on the lookout for new ideas. There are even roles like Researcher and Development Producer in most media companies, so surely RD&I is embedded everywhere. Unfortunately not. In my experience,… Continue reading Creativity ≠ Innovation

Here are a sample of the outputs from three different AI models, Midjourney, Disco Diffusion and Dall-e to show how they can be used to create aesthetics and assets on a theme. The models were given prompts including different combinations of the words dancers, cables, mobile phones, child, woodland and dystopia. The selection below aren’t… Continue reading Using AI for inspiration

The Metaverse wars are starting. Meta (aka. Facebook) have bet on the trend, to the tune of $10B and a name change. They have the social clout and the platform in Oculus, but everyone, even they themselves, recognise that just as we didn’t end up all using a single Social Media platform, the Metaverse will… Continue reading Converging 3D Worlds

The take-up of blockchain (or more accurately Distributed Ledger Technology) in the TV/film industry has been relatively slow to date, while other industries seem to be jumping at the opportunity. It may be the toxic image of crypto, and let’s face it money is often a dirty word at the sharp end of creativity, but… Continue reading Media Production and Blockchain

While we thought we were safe, Artificial Intelligence is starting to encroach on the creative professions. We can either fight it or learn to use it, so here is my rolling list of potentially useful AI tools and repos for image and video manipulation. I haven’t checked out all of these in detail, but hopefully… Continue reading AI for Visual Creativity

With the dust truly settled on 2021, I’ve had the chance to take a breather and have a good look back at Shwsh’s journey over the last year. What could have been a first hard year in business was actually a pleasure thanks to our excellent clients and a constant flow of interesting R&D challenges.… Continue reading A look back at 2021

Most Innovation strategy research focuses on products and multinational business. It is rarely applied to the media sector, perhaps because innovation isn’t seen as separate from the day to day business of making new programmes. But are the same strategies at play here, are there any lessons we can learn from other industries? Glocalisation of… Continue reading Reverse Innovation: a Squid Game

You are the hero of this story, about to start on the epic quest of R&D to discover a new magic solution to vanquish a belligerent old enemy. Like any hero you need to be fearless. Here are the five reasons why: Fearless of Change It is all too easy to be too precious about… Continue reading Fearless Innovation

When Black Mirror did their interactive episode Bandersnatch on Netflix in 2018, everyone in broadcasting suddenly got very excited about interactive video. It wasn’t really the first time though and interactive video had been doing the rounds since in FMV games in the 90’s. I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside teams that have done… Continue reading Interactive Video Tools