Making the Stakes Felt: Foresight Research as Film

Author: Cimeon Ellerton-Kay

Contributors: Noemi Ponzoni, Liz Convey, Halina Rice, Simon Cronshaw

Date: 23 February 2026

Summary: The futures ahead are already being rehearsed: unevenly, quietly, experimentally. But can a research report make people feel that? This post explores how we turned the CoSTAR Foresight Lab's Scenarios for the Creative Industries in 2040 into a short film, and what that process taught us about translating insight into experience.

At the CoSTAR Foresight Lab, our mission is practical. We help the creative industries understand and respond to the forces shaping their future. Our written reports are designed to inform, but we know that even the richest analytical material can struggle to reach the people most likely to act on it. Moments, Praxis, Paths: Scenarios for the Creative Industries in 2040, a short film produced for REMIX Summit London 2026, was an experiment in translating research into something audiences could genuinely internalise and use as a springboard for action. 

Beyond the Slide 

Simon Cronshaw, who co-commissioned the film, framed the challenge clearly: the creative entrepreneurs at REMIX are the "doers" most likely to shape what comes next. He believed that a typical research presentation wouldn't spark the conversations the work deserved. We needed to move toward storytelling, not telling audiences what will happen, but providing "diving off points" for them to imagine and build what comes next. 

The film explores four scenarios for the creative industries in 2040 ranging from media that adapts in real-time to individual biometrics, to grassroots creative unions wresting power back from platforms, and introducing action through the concept of desire paths (the spontaneous trails people carve when the designed routes no longer serve them).

Rather than presenting these as findings to absorb, editor Liz Convey treated the research as raw documentary material, shifting from an emphasis on description to embodiment. As Producer Noemi Ponzoni put it, film lets you literally show people living inside possible futures. Setting and pacing signal consequence without spelling it out, allowing viewers to arrive at implications themselves, without feeling instructed. 

Built Through Collaboration 

The process between the whole collaborative team, but especially Liz and composer Halina Rice was genuinely iterative: Liz cut initial visuals to Halina's early tracks, Halina composed new pieces in response to that first cut, Liz then reshaped the picture around the new music alongside regular check ins with the research team behind the source material. That back-and-forth gave the film a coherence that rarely emerges outside long-form documentary work. 

Sections could shift register entirely once expressed visually and musically. For example, the Desire Paths chapter could easily read as detached and hypothetical but became, in Halina's words, something that "filled me with hope and excitement." The scenarios became places you could inhabit and rehearse, not just understand. The core creatives worked at speed, with Halina composing nearly a full track a day (work that might usually take months) but that urgency, rather than compromising quality, became part of the creative energy. 

The voiceover drew directly from two published Lab reports - Introduction to Moments and Future in Praxis - whose scenarios were already written as narrative fiction, so translated naturally into a script. With an added introduction and conclusion this script became the spine around which Liz and Halina built their audio-visual layers. 

Agile, Ethical, Scalable 

We delivered high production values on a short timeline by being ruthless about constraints. We commissioned a human voiceover artist rather than an AI-generated one, both for quality and ethics. For visual gaps, we used Marey by Moonvalley (an AI video model trained on licensed data), chosen deliberately as our sole documented AI input. It allowed us to evoke futures that haven't been "played" yet, avoiding the culturally familiar imagery that stock footage tends to produce. 

This toolkit, translating foresight into experience, is designed to scale. We plan to expand into a series of short films, live performances, and even VR experiences where audiences don't just watch scenarios but navigate them with genuine agency. 

A New Standard 

Making the stakes felt is what moves people from insight to action. A PDF can inform; a film can disturb, inspire, and linger. As the creative industries navigate increasingly uncertain futures, the tools we use to think about those futures matter too. This was one experiment in getting that right, and the real test is still ahead. What happens when an audience doesn't just watch a possible future, but steps into it, argues with it, and decides to build something different? We intend to find out.