Digital Futures Summit – Regenerate: To Restore, To Renew, To Reimagine

Opening Address by Dr Nell Greenwood, CEO, AFTRS

When: 12:00pm – 12:05pm

Worldbuilding: Restoring collective storytelling, imagining better futures

When: 12:05pm – 1:10pm

Speakers:

• Katerina Cizek, Research Scientist and Artistic Director, MIT Co-Creation Studio / Open Documentary Lab
• Naphtali Faulkner, Director, Origame Digital
• Liam Young, Director

Moderator:

• Natalie Beak, Discipline Lead, Production Design, AFTRS

This session brings together the intentional craft of worldbuilding and the expansive practice of worlding to rethink how futures are imagined – and made. Moving beyond storytelling as representation, it positions narrative as a living system: participatory, emergent, and deeply entangled with the worlds it shapes. Through speculative design, collaborative storytelling, and multidimensional research, the session explores how futures are actively constructed across social, environmental, and cultural dimensions.

How does “worldbuilding” and “worlding” move us beyond representation toward active restoration and regeneration of creative ecosystems? And in doing so, how might we co-create more just, inclusive and regenerative worlds, and what new forms of authorship, agency and responsibility does that demand?

Ancestral to Artificial Intelligence: Reclaiming human creativity

When: 1:30pm – 2:30pm

Speakers:

• Jake Duczynski, Creative Director/Co-Owner, Studio Gilay
• Tory Stephens, Manager, Climate Fiction & Brand Partnerships, Grist
• Lisa Russell, CEO/Founder, ArtsEnvoy.ai

Moderator:

• Pauline Clague, Filmmaker

This session invites a critical and hopeful interrogation of the stories we tell and how they are informed by the technologies we use to tell them.

This panel asks how can we move beyond a framing of AI as technological disruption to a tool for amplified imagination? If we place AI in dialogue with ancestral intelligence, and embodied, community-held and historically resilient ways of knowing that have long shaped how stories are told and futures are imagined, can we create a space where machine capability intersects with human creativity, memory and meaning-making?

Through this lens, the discussion asks how human-centred creativity can remain relational, contextually situated and ethically grounded in an era of rapid technological change. What must we repair, reconfigure and re-story so that human, cultural and ecological intelligences can flourish together?

Screen producers’ next era of creative possibility and renewal

When: 2:50pm – 4:00pm

Speakers:

• Donna Andrews, CEO & Partner, Sticky Pictures
• Zoe Angus, Director of Industrial, Screen Producers Australia
• Vanilla Tupu, Director/Producer, It’s Vanilla Productions
• Chloe Rickard, Partner, Executive Producer and COO, Jungle Entertainment

Moderator:

• Darren Chau, Director, Production, AFTRS

Drawing on ongoing AFTRS research, we examine the skills producers can develop to strengthen their position, moving beyond survival to renewal – restructuring their enterprises, diversifying revenue streams, and embedding audience and market intelligence at the core of their strategy. In the spirit of the Digital Futures Summit’s call to restore, renew and reimagine industry ecosystems, this panel unpacks practical pathways for building sustainable, globally competitive slates of distinctively Australian stories. From innovative financing and partnerships to strategies for competing with larger-scale players, we ask: what needs to be reconfigured, rebuilt or rethought for production businesses to flourish in a rapidly evolving landscape?