From bifurcated brains for a neater work-life balance to mass robot rebellion, film & TV is once again beside itself with the thrills and spills of horizon scanning, specifically where the human-technology interlace is the premier tension. Record-breaking Severance just confirmed season 3, while last month Netflix’ Electric State – one of the most expensive movies ever made – became the latest in a long cinematic lineage toying with our attraction-repulsion to sentient machines (just don’t read the critics’ reviews).

Leaning hard into a cultural obsession that will exponentially snowball alongside the rise of agentic AI and human-augmenting tech is SNTIENT: a new cross-media storytelling initiative created by a London-based collective of creative technologists from the Fashion Innovation Agency and immersive digital specialists Dandelion & Burdock. Launching today, it presents an intriguing mix of embedded marketing, custom-made spin-off activations, and alternative futures-scoping for brands keen to probe mega-topics including climate crisis, ultra-urbanisation, resource scarcity and – presumably – even the dangers of a society inexorably addicted to tech.

A New Era for Storytelling. But What Exactly Is It?

SNTIENT is a futuristic animated digital story based on “meticulously crafted environments, assets, and droids” into whose master narrative brands can slide and, should they wish, help shape.

It’s been designed with cutting-edge motion capture and Epic Games Unreal Engine to marry pre-rendered visuals and dynamic new virtual sequences, enabling the collective to switch the tale up at speed: “it will evolve iteratively over time to reflect real shifts in the world around us,” says Dandelion & Burdock cofounder, Niall Thompson.

As yet, in the original film there is no capacity for brands to interact with fans, nor transactional brand experiences; this isn’t a metaverse or digital marketplace. It’s an existing filmic world in which to add content – explorative storytelling onto which brands can imprint their ethos, direction, messaging and products. However – and this is where things get juicy – if desired, they can then transfer those stories into other brand experiences from printed media to mixed reality (XR) and/or AI-enhanced activations. Film, television, gaming, virtual production and spatial computing are all promised as part of the highly-detailed mix (for more on this jump to Make Your Own Spin-Off: Transmedia Possibilities).

It’s applicable to any all brands but those already showing interest come from industries including fashion, sports, automotive, audio and consumer tech.

The “Sentience Inflection”: Where the Story Starts

Chapter one begins in MegaDistrict 4 several decades into the future – far away enough to embody the enigmatic buzz of speculative innovation but not so futuristic that it feels like somebody else’s distant preoccupation (or problem). Vertical living and floating farms abound with governance despatched by two key tech corporations. One controls physical life while the other handles virtual existence – the metaverses (also an allusion to social media) into which the populus descends for pleasure/distraction. Some citizens are opt-in compliant; others exist on the fringes. The robots’ awakening is the common thread: machine sentience is this project’s MacGuffin.

According to the FIA’s Moin Roberts-Islam, who also wrote the story: “It’s a society where humans live symbiotically alongside robots, doing the menial tasks; the dull, dirty, dangerous and repetitive stuff. But then there’s an inflection point, this moment where the robots in society gain sentience, and that’s what the story hinges on. The most important bit is that it’s set in a world with numerous parallels with today’s society.”

How Brands Become Part of the Story

Some robots seek revenge for their relegation to menial labour while others are curious about humanity, their surroundings and self-expression – which is where brands insert their presence. That could be on billboards; by dressing the droids (“fashion is always important because it’s a reflection of society and the way we experience fashion through technology is already swiftly evolving” says the FIA’s Matthew Drinkwater); shown in apartments; or vehicles, offering up fresh visions of the future of mobility. Digital replicas of people, products and garments can all be instilled via virtual production shoots.

The core narrative is created by the SNTIENT collective but participating brands can shape its trajectory. “It is, as a starting point, effectively embedded marketing that allows them [brands] to tell a story that showcases their ethos throughout. We can even rewrite a customised story with them” says Roberts-Islam.

Make Your Own Spin-Off: Transmedia Possibilities

One of the core tenets of the project, made possible by a team with fingers deep in numerous technological pies, is the capacity for brands to take ‘their chapter’ and create spin-off content – stretching, progressing and personalising the project.

According to Roberts-Islam: “We can tie in a whole bunch of different strands – re-tell it as a short movie, a book, a location-based AR or VR activation, or make 3D printed art representing the characters and styling. In future it may become interactive – we could potentially produce a virtual spin-off space including cutting edge AI-power based non-Player Characters (NPCs) to converse with. You can have all these different modes of communication and storytelling.” He equates it to the vastly powerful world of fan-made content: “It’s a similar to how people watch a film or animated series then write fan fiction. The narrative lives on.”

Thoughts Seeds for Internal R&D

That easily digestible leap into low-level futures R&D is arguably one of the big benefits of the concept. It’s a safe space for brands to turn their teams minds onto a reshaped future beyond data points and statistics; to personally feel their way through alternative scenarios where seeing (and storytelling supported by constantly advancing new tech) is the key to believing and designing.

“We start in a dystopian place which then becomes a place of expression . Can we start again? Can we reset?” says Dandelion & Burdock’s cofounder Dickon Knowles. Roberts-Islam adds: “How can we make this new world creative, hopeful and positive? SNTIENT is not moralistic in any way – there’s no judgement – but it is a call to action: to brands and also artists and digital creatives to come and collaborate with us and help build this world.”