StoryFutures Academy was the UK’s National Centre for Immersive Storytelling led by the National Film and Television School and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Funded by the government’s industrial strategy challenge fund and part of UK Research and Innovation’s Audience of the Future Challenge. The Academy developed creative training and research programmes in immersive storytelling to ensure the UK creative workforce is the most skilled in the world in the use of VR, AR and MR.

Workstreams –
On-set training and Bootcamps
On-set training and Bootcamps provided professionals with hands-on training on immersive productions to acquire experience and new skills on set.
Co-Productions 
Co-productions represented a vital intervention in supporting innovation, promoting R&D collaboration and de-risking investment in training to enable companies to exploit new markets made possible through immersive technologies. These projects provided a mixture of lab-based and hands-on learning for new and intermediate individuals and companies to the immersive landscape, launching careers, business plans and new products into the immersive landscape. 
Experimental Labs and Writers Rooms
The Experimental Labs & Writers Room workstream focused on offering a set of structured skills and talent development workshops that provided a crucial point of entry for UK creatives to engage with the potential of immersive storytelling. These upskilling initiatives acted as a gateway to not only the landscape of AR and VR but also to the opportunities available through the wider StoryFutures Academy workstreams.  
Long form Accelerator Programmes 
As the StoryFutures Academy programme progressed, we saw the value of combining the structured training of our Experimental Lab workstream with the hands-on skills development opportunity offered by our Collaborative Co-production workstream. By doing so we created longer ‘accelerator programmes’ that developed the skills of individuals and the capacities of companies to exploit the business opportunities in immersive storytelling.  
Skills Pipeline (TTT, ECR)
This workstream was designed to build training capacity across the UK to enable the development of a national skills pipeline for immersive production. This included producing a set of skills reports charting the needs of the immersive production sector, as well as the growing need for virtual production skills in the screen industries. It also included our Train the Trainer and Early Career Research programmes, aimed at building the UK’s capacity for immersive and virtual production training and research amongst HEIs.