Digital Catapult > Case studies > Accelerating AI innovation in the West of England’s creative industries

Case Study

Accelerating AI innovation in the West of England’s creative industries

Artificial intelligence is transforming the UK’s creative economy, providing a powerful boost to productivity, creativity and market reach. AI is being used to unlock new production methods, enhance workflows, and to create new ways to personalise content.

The UK creative sector contributes £124 billion to the national economy and employs 2.4 million people. Integrating AI with creative skills is a cornerstone of the UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy, which marks a new era of collaboration between government and high growth industries. The comprehensive Sector Plan for Creative Industries sets out the ambition for the UK to be recognised as the best place in the world to make and invest in film and TV, video games, music, performing and visual arts, and advertising and marketing.

The MyWorld programme

Led by the University of Bristol and backed by UKRI, MyWorld explores the future of creative technology innovation by pioneering new ideas, products and processes. The programme focuses on supporting the creative industries in the West of England by providing access to world-class facilities, funding, research, tools, and training. It brings together prominent partners from academia and industry, and invests in creative technology innovation to stimulate growth, drive societal change, and strengthen the region’s position as a centre for cutting-edge development.

The MyWorld programme is a consortium of 13 partners – most based in the region – including universities, relevant organisations (including Aardman and the BBC), and innovation agencies such as Digital Catapult and Watershed.

MyWorld’s four successive open call accelerators (two Challenges and two CR&D) were all delivered by Digital Catapult, and strategically designed to focus on a different theme while building on previous learnings at each stage. While only one of the four calls was designed to specifically address AI, its use played a part in all four calls, allowing the programme to build on the previous results and ramp up the impact.

MyWorld & Digital Catapult Challenge Call 1 - Cohort Voices

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Challenge Calls

Challenge Calls were open to commercial companies delivering early–stage prototypes in response to industry challenges defined by industry partners (industry challenge owners). These 16-week accelerators offered up to £50,000 funding for each project, with wrap–around support from Digital Catapult’s business and technical experts, plus others from the MyWorld network.

Challenge Call 1, Catalysts and Connectors (Jan-Sept 2023)

Supporting nine businesses to prototype new tools for industries within the creative sector – many of which would involve the application of AI – helping them test bold ideas, access networks and develop products that would have regional and national impact.

Challenge Call 2, Amplifying Imagination

This challenge focused on the application of AI in the context of three themes: perception, creativity and productivity. It delivered nine early-stage prototypes that can be considered as frontier applications of AI technology, each directly informed by existing and current industry challenges defined by the BBC and AWS.

How can AI technologies be used to ensure a consistent and optimal audio experience for diverse listeners across various devices and environments, and how audio could be created for capture, recreation or output, mixed and produced in one setting and played back in another?

How can AI approaches relieve some of the manually intensive and laborious tasks within the creative sector through automation, analysis and optimisation?

CR&D 1 and 2

Collaborative Research and Development projects brought industry and academic partners together to fuel groundbreaking research and deliver commercial products for media production in the UK and beyond, delivering ambitious innovation projects that centred on experimentation while boosting the region’s creative ecosystem. These were longer-term projects (a year to 18 months) focussed on experimental innovation, with funding of up to £250,000 per project.

Participants partnered with one of the four main universities in the region (Bristol, Bath, Bath Spa and UWE), giving them access to world–leading research expertise, as well as university facilities, technicians, user testing and additional delivery and research support from PhD students.

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Digital Catapult’s role and contribution

As a partner in the programme and specialist in deep tech innovation and adoption, Digital Catapult delivered the four strategic open call accelerators for MyWorld: fully-funded, low-risk opportunities for participating businesses to experiment and accelerate their growth by carrying out innovative R&D.

Through these open calls, Digital Catapult provided access to funding while supporting participants with valuable business insights and technical expertise for researching and prototyping new products and services. Leveraging our accelerator expertise, this support included mentoring and workshops, while facilitating valuable access to peer networking and industry connections, such as with NVIDIA and AWS. Our partnerships also enabled us to bridge MyWorld with other relevant programmes and opportunities, including workshops offered by The Alan Turing Institute, and high-profile creative industry events, including London SXSW and ACM SIGGRAPH.

Digital Catapult’s focus is on deep tech, including AI, so we were able to provide valuable AI expertise, upskilling, and guidance on responsible innovation in AI.

Upskilling

To equip participants with key business practices that would support the successful and effective delivery of their early-stage prototypes, and that would help them enter and sustain themselves in the markets they were entering, we delivered multiple upskilling interventions, all contextualised around the application of AI and the key considerations for entering this new and thriving market. These included:

Workshops on defining the value proposition and pitching to investors

Bespoke design, technical and product support, largely through one-to-ones with Digital Catapult tech experts and business professionals as well as from elsewhere in the region

One-to-one support and technical feasibility assessments with industrial challenge owners

As our tool is based on EDI data, it’s really important that the output’s accurate and that we’re seen as trustworthy in that space. That’s why it’s really important that we’re building in the trust and the security of our AI at the very beginning.”
Renee Jacobs Project Lead, Gritty Talent

Responsible innovation

AI has huge potential to create positive impact, but its application carries inherent risks, such as reflecting or amplifying social biases from the data it is trained on, or processing and inferring sensitive information without consent. It could also potentially lead to large-scale job losses and deepen inequality.

We encouraged participants to consider these risks as early as possible in their prototype design and development, and delivered workshops focussing on responsible innovation. We also delivered workshops to upskill teams on how to analyse and evaluate their solutions for the potential risk of unethical behaviour, and show how they might implement stringent measures to reduce this risk.

Connecting participants with the national AI tech community

As deep tech experts, Digital Catapult continually grows capability in UK AI innovation, most notably through the national Innovate UK BridgeAI programme, which invests in AI integration and adoption.

Recognising the potential for synergy, we delivered a workshop that brought together participants in MyWorld and BridgeAI to foster collaboration and connect AI innovators in the West with those from elsewhere in the UK.

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Programme highlights

Force of Habit, originally an experimental games studio, has pivoted to create and deliver IMPRESS, a complete toolkit for indie game publishing. This uses AI for sentiment analysis from social listening and launch data.

Using LLMs and similar technology, Meaning Machine enabled freeform conversations within gaming world constraints.

Lux Aeterna explored the application of generative models within traditional VFX workflows, such as using Stable Diffusion to create asset maps to drive procedural creation.

Bristol-based Noods Radio partnered with AWS to focus on creating tools that could liberate their studio team from time-consuming administrative tasks. By integrating AI solutions, their aim was to help teams to enhance efficiency, scalability, and listener experiences.

Octopus Immersive Laboratory (originally Gentleman Octopus), partnered with the BBC to create ‘Introspect’, which focuses on the intersection between the audience and the performance of a XR music show, and uses AI to facilitate more personal experiences. It collects sensor data from the audience’s XR headsets and uses AI to create responsive and generative visualisations of audio in real time, and leading audience members to interact and share the experience.

Concerns over losing creative control, the perceived need to navigate complex software, and the risk of IP theft have made film and television producers hesitant to fully embrace AI technology. Partnering with AWS, Nulight Studios has addressed these concerns by developing Virtuoso AI, a suite of powerful video editing tools that bridges the gap between GenAI and the film and television industry.

Motion Impossible experimented with AI integration to support their project ‘DynaDolly’, creating a system that gives consistent camera control while preserving the creative influence of production crews.

Distortion Studios, which offers specialist virtual production services, partnered with University of Bath’s Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research & Applications (CAMERA) to assess how volumetric video can be integrated into the production pipeline of XR and virtual production workflows, ultimately investigating Gaussian splatting, a cutting-edge form of 3D rendering that uses AI.

Celestial and Bath Spa University researched the live, real-time control of drone shows, also bringing in a fellow to investigate the technical and creative possibilities presented by the use of AI in drone show creation.

29

small-to-medium sized businesses supported

£2.2

million awarded in follow-on funding

£800,000

investment and £650,000 match funding generated

Around 30

new jobs created

MyWorld impact

Opening doors to future funding

Taking part in the programme enabled many participating companies to progress their journeys, giving them additional credibility that helped them to obtain further funding.

Supported by the BBC in their challenge, Black Goblin focused on integrating AI into audio production processes. They went on to participate in Baltin Ventures, a later-stage accelerator through which they received £30,000 to continue developing their product. They are now part of the MyWorld Creative Pathways accelerator.

Gritty Talent uses an AI-driven semi-automated toolset to support the diversification of the talent pipeline in TV and film. They have received follow-on funding of over £40,000 through Innovate UK’s feasibility studies for artificial intelligence solutions.

Market production

Noods Radio has now launched their music discovery app to help listeners navigate shows and which integrates their AI development from the MyWorld Challenge Call.

MyWorld Creative Pathways

As MyWorld moved into its final year, MyWorld Creative Pathways was launched: a business growth accelerator for companies that have come through the MyWorld programme. This accelerator, also delivered by Digital Catapult, focussed on taking more mature business concepts and early-stage prototypes to market. As well as offering £15,000 for business growth support, Creative Pathways tied together all the learnings and support from the various MyWorld projects while helping to scale the innovations developed.

It’s provided an opportunity to develop and tool a process to help creatives understand their audience better through monitoring how they move through the space. We’re trying to create a tool that creatives can use, rather than be replaced by.
Benjamin Winstone Founder, Octopus Immersive Laboratory

The MyWorld programme has enabled us to develop tools that save us around 18 hours each week. So we’re able to refocus on important stuff for our organisation, which is supporting our community.
Leon Pattrick Noods Radio

About MyWorld

MyWorld is a flagship programme for the UK’s creative technology sector. Led by the University of Bristol, it convenes the leading universities in the region, and over 30 technology, creative and film companies to cement the West of England’s position as a creative media powerhouse. 