SNTIENT: A Transmedia Storytelling Experience
A UKRI-funded experience translating a single story across film, mixed reality and virtual reality.
Developed by Fashion Innovation Agency in partnership with Target3D and Dandelion & Burdock, SNTIENT is a UKRI-funded proof of concept exploring transmedia storytelling as a new model for immersive brand experience. Working across virtual production, mixed reality and virtual reality, the project investigates how a single narrative can be told simultaneously across formats.
SNTIENT reframes brand storytelling as spatial material, transforming a linear narrative into a navigable, narrative world shaped through volumetric capture, real-time engine pipelines, and Gaussian splatting.
SNTIENT follows a single scene set in a near-future shaped by AI and humanoid robotics, dressed in garments designed by Christopher Raeburn, shot on a virtual production and volumetric capture stage at Target3D's studio. Each element of the scene is captured then rebuilt for delivery across three distinct formats: a cinematic film, a mixed reality experience layering digital content onto the physical world, and a fully immersive virtual reality journey. The entire production was conceived to exist simultaneously across all three forms from the outset. The result is a single story that can be watched, entered, or inhabited.
Using virtual production, volumetric capture and real-time Unreal Engine pipelines, SNTIENT transforms a single scene into three distinct forms of immersive storytelling.
SNTIENT investigates how a single narrative can be built once and delivered across multiple spatial formats. Through extensive technical development with Target3D, the project reconciles the different demands of each format, cinematic pacing, spatial navigation, and full immersion, into a single coherent world. SNTIENT explores how emerging virtual production and spatial capture techniques can represent fashion storytelling as something to be entered, not simply watched. The next phase of the project moves into research-led user testing, measuring how audiences respond, cognitively and emotionally, to a story told this way.
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