Making 'After the End' – Liam Young & Natasha Wanganeen

Video transcript

In November 2024, we were joined at ACMI by artist Liam Young and actor Natasha Wanganeen (Rabbit Proof Fence, 2002) to hear more about the making of After the End, their vibrant, digital artwork that imagines a reclaimed Australia after fossil fuels.

Joining the artists were Keri Elmsly (Executive Director of Programming, ACMI) and Amanda Haskard (Curator, ACMI), who, along with Chelsey O'Brien (Curator, ACMI), conceived our exhibition The Future & Other Fictions (Thu 28 Nov 2024 – Sun 27 Apr 2025).

Video transcript

Keri Elmsly

I'd like just to start by introducing ourselves and I'm going to have the artists introduce themselves and sort of what brought them to being here today. So over to you, Natasha.

Natasha Wanganeen

I'm Natasha Wanganeen. I'm a proud Kaurna, Narungga, Ngarrindjeri and Noongar woman. I'm based in South Australia and do film, television and theatre. And I'm really excited to be here.

This is my first exhibition working with Liam and ACMI. And yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Amanda Haskard

I'm Amanda Haskard. I'm a proud Gunai-Kurnai woman. I'd also like to acknowledge that we're here on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung anI I pay my respects and also welcome sis.

It's so great to have you here. I am currently a curator at ACMI and one of the co-curators of The Future and Other Fictions.

Liam Young

Hi, everyone. I'm Liam. I'm just a dumb kid from Brisbane.

And I'm one of the co-curators of the show downstairs and also I authored one of the new commissions with Natasha.

I'm a director and artist now based in Los Angeles and I tell stories about the future.

KE

So a little bit about the origin of this show. We sort of founded the idea a couple of years ago. At the time, I didn't live here. I also lived in Los Angeles.

At the time, George Miller was shooting Furiosa here and determined to follow really practica effects beyond location and follow his tradition of filmmaking.

And conversely, at the same time, the Fritz Lang Metropolis film was being remade by Apple TV and it was slated to be made here in Melbourne's Docklands at Australia's largest virtual production wall.

So my sort of thought was the future of screen culture is actually being made right now in Australia and as you wake up in the future literally here, then we should be creating the future.

And that was the seed for the show that I started to talk to Seb (Chan) about and Liam and I have worked together for over 10 years.

And so from that idea of how Australian screen culture creators shaping the future and how does that have global reach and then sort of at the time and still today now, the thought of hope and pluralism seems to be like a little bit Pollyanna and that's absolutely not what we're here to do. We're here to posit and create new imaginaries and how we do that, we really wanted to embrace multiple voices in.

Amanda, I wonder if you could sort of give us some of the framework for the show and what kind of questions you were asking as you developed it.

AH

So as Kerry said, we came together and to kind of start to discuss and think about this idea of possible positive pluralist futures.

I also want to acknowledge Chelsea O'Brien who's in the room with us today, who is also one of the co-curators of the show and was instrumental in developing the curatorial framework and the story alongside Liam and I and the whole ACMI team.

The show is really about showcasing the maker and the ability of makers and creatives to create worlds on screen and the power of storytelling through screen culture.

So the show itself doesn't privilege any screen methods.

I don't know if anyone's seen the show yet, but when you go downstairs, it's a rich, vibrant show that showcases over 180 works, looking at everything from video games, screen-based art, film, television. We've included props, scripts, costumes, design process materials.

So, it's really kind of pulling back the curtain and doing a deep dive into the process of makers and the power of storytelling on screen.

Some of the questions that we ask or we pose to our visitors through the journey of the show is we sort of bring audiences into the first section, which really presents an archive of futures or futures that have come before on screen.

We onboard our visitors or our audiences, for a better word, to acknowledge that these stories have come before on screen. And then we start to flip the script. So, the first section really looks at it poses the question, how do we imagine? And it really leans into narratives and the idea and the thread of a story. And we look at process materials and ideas and how they're born on screen.

And then the second section, we come into more of the kind of dystopias. We acknowledge their existence.

But what we've done through the show is really focus on makers and their ability to flip this idea of dystopia and reimagine it. And we've done that by asking the question, what worlds exist? And we question who holds the power in these dystopias and these realities that we've seen or these fictional worlds rather that we've seen on screen.

And then the third section of the show really asks, who will we be? So in this section, we have the beautiful works from Wakanda Forever and the Black Panther costumes. And this is really about championing those who wrote themselves into the story. And we focus very much on ritual and culture and the embedded ideas of this through the works. And then sitting alongside that, we have two wonderful commissions, which I'm sure we'll dive into in a moment.

But that's the kind of framing of the show. And Chelsea and I and Liam really wanted to also embed a First Nations framework and this idea of sovereignty and really positioning First Nations stories embedded within that and the power of, I guess, our people to tell these stories and really redefine and really shape the future.

So that's kind of the show in a nutshell.

KE

Thank you. And we're really here to dive into talking about After the End. And one of the important things about commissioning new work is to create the conditions for people to do something they've never done before and to create the support and the freedom to explore new ideas and new ways of making.

And so when we approached Liam not just to co-curate, but to also be commissioned, we laid a bunch of challenges at his feet.

And I'm just interested in how you and Natasha came to collaborate.

LY

Yeah, I mean, this is a good gig, like curating a show and then curating myself into the show as the person that does the major commission. I'm going to do this more often now. So museums out there, let me know. This is a model that's easily repeatable. And that was the challenge, really.

Like, I mean, inherent to my practice is collaboration. Like as an artist, my medium is imaginary worlds and world making is inherently complex and big as a project.

So I always kind of work with scientists and technologists and theorists and writers and so on to help envision these worlds.

And often I will open up the world to invite other people in to explore and to play in that territory. So I was excited to develop a new world, I suppose, for this show. And in thinking about who I wanted to work with, I have this extraordinary wish list of people. And Natasha is well at the top of that list.

I mean, I grew up in the 90s in Australia and watching a film like Rabbit Proof Fence was really formative in my understanding about who we were as a country and who I was. And Natasha has always been on my radar ever since.

How old were you when making that film? Like 14 or something?

NW

Yeah, 15.

LY

So it's taken quite a while since then to finally find ways to connect.

And Natasha's voice and the tone of her voice and the evolution of her practice from that 15 year old girl to now one of the leading First Nations actors in the country. And most importantly, I think one of the leading activist voices in the country was really critical. So when I was thinking about a co-writer for the project, Natasha seemed perfect and had come back on my radar because I'd just watched a short film called Bunker, which was co-written by Natasha.

And it was reimagining the first fleet invasion through the lens of a science fiction story, recasting those European set invaders as aliens coming to land. And I think it was, I don't know if it's your first exploration into science fiction, but it made me aware of your work again.

And I was like, OK, Natasha's in a sci-fi space now. This is perfect. So I was building really on the back of that sentiment, I suppose.

KE

Natasha, can you just talk a little bit about what brought you from to sci-fi and then from that, what took you from the Bunker to saying yes to this?

NW

As a child of the 80s, I think we all have an obsession with sci-fi action movies. They don't make them like they used to anymore.

So being a child on the mission, one of the oldest Christian missions in Australia, we only had 80s action movies and a couple of sci-fi.

So that really took us out of our world and placed us into another.

It was very inspiring because a lot of sci-fi and fantasy stories, I don't think people realise that our culture is exactly like that.

You might not see it, but those are the worlds that we live in as well, culturally. So it was just natural to jump in there as well.

And I understand that not many Indigenous people and actors, producers do sci-fis here. So I wanted to break that open for my community as well.

And working with Roe Pullen, a local Adelaide director and filmmaker, was a great opportunity to showcase how we see things and reimagine First Fleet through sci-fi lens with aliens coming down and they come for everybody.

And the Indigenous people are the only people that actually learnt how to live with it because we've been through this before. And we're constantly going through that change.

So when Liam messaged me and sent me an email, I jumped at it.

I was like, oh my God, this is insane. I absolutely want to be involved. So thank you for getting me involved, bro.

LY

Yeah, I mean, that's one that's I mean, I often call myself an email artist and part of my practice for any artists in the room, as you know, we spend more time writing emails than we do actually making work.

But the fun part is just sending these love letters out into the world, like to Natasha saying, hey, this stuff's awesome. Can we do a thing together? Or to the musicians that are involved in the project and so on.

You just kind of like cross your fingers and send an email. And sometimes they find the right person. Hopefully they avoid agents and all the people that are designed to get in the way of creatives talking to each other.

And then you can just hang out and talk about cool ideas.

KE

Well, I'd really I think we'd all like to hear a bit more about how the narrative and the premise of the story came together, because one of the things Amanda, Chelsea and I were talking to you about, Liam, before you figured out who you were collaborating with was how this work needed to sit aside and somewhat different from the series and body of the work you've been developing already.

In a really simple way, you haven't lived here for a really, really long time. And by bringing you back here so commonly and thinking about how you would make here was, I think, a challenge we wanted to put to you. And I'd love to hear how the story came together between the two of you.

LY

Yeah, I mean, although increasingly across recent years, I'm making more and more work that's being shown here in Australia. I've never made a work about Australia or set in Australia. And I think that was one of the provocations that you set in commissioning the work originally. And in that context, I was interested.

I've made a lot of work around resources, around mining, around new forms of energy and so on. And I obviously wanted to connect into that work.

A lot of that work skews towards the documentary kind of narrative, like a present day speculations. And obviously in Australia at the moment, to a large extent, we define our identities around our relationship to resources.

Australia globally is known as kind of the quarry of the world and the mining industry, the energy sector really defines the contemporary identity of Australia. And what would it mean to start to imagine a moment beyond fossil fuels and beyond extraction? What happens if we came together to say no and to stop and to turn that off would really mean reimagining who we were.

And it's not for me to do that. And that was part of working with Natasha was to say, like, OK, let's assume as a starting point that we issue a moratorium on fossil fuels and resource extraction and we just say no in this absolute aspirational moment. We collectively decide that enough is enough. And that is the starting point of our story.

Who would we be then when communities historically displaced by these industries would be allowed to move back in and reassert their sovereignty? What does that look like? And that was a simple kind of task of the film.

And then really, in many ways, what I wanted to do with Natasha was to tell a new creation story then from that point and to say, like, what would this look like? What would be the new values that we would start to develop? And that's really where the collaboration, the story started to come together, I suppose.

And then back and forth across Instagram and so on, Natasha would send me photographs and links to pieces and photographs of butterfish and fishing competitions and so on to try and introduce me a little bit to the issues in the context of her country and community.

NW

I think when you're thinking about the future, you cannot dismiss the past when it comes to cultural technology and the way we manage the land all the way around the country.

You know, there's yet, of course, we can't go back. You know, we can't go backwards. We can never have the land the way it was unless we stop using fossil fuels and doing coal mining and stuff. But there is a potential, a massive, beautiful opportunity to work with First Nations people all the way around the country to come up with things like this in our future. You know, we've got so many children that are out there and don't know about things like this, but our children get raised with looking after the land, protecting the waters and culturally protecting what we have left. But we also want to evolve that.

So this is a beautiful piece showing the potential of that thinking.

KE

Can you speak a little bit about, obviously, you narrate the piece.

NW

I hate my voice, by the way.

KE

But in terms of co-writing and writing, how did that sort of, because it was a really quick turnaround, we didn't really give you long. Sorry. So how did that kind of fragment of the script and the narration sort of exchange between you? How did that flow?

NW

Well, I've seen Liam's work and I've seen the way he speaks about his work, and I'm not, I'm very, I use layman's terms a lot, coming from a mission. I try to keep things simple.

So when Liam sent me the narration and said, what do you think about this? I was like, OK, we need to make that more relatable to community members like myself and people who aren't in this world.

So it was just finding that balance of reiterating the important scientific things in there, but also dragging people back to what it is to be a human living on the land and living with the law of the land.

So I think we did a great job.

You know, I recorded that in my bedroom, actually, and sent it to Liam.

So it's a beautiful piece and I'm proud of it. And it could only have come from both of us working together and actually looking through each paragraph and saying, how do we get this message across from both of us? So, yeah.

KE

Amanda, well, we talk a lot about accessibility and legibility here and plain language, but I think we can have plain language and still be poetic and still be aspirational and still activate people's imaginations.

Amanda, when you saw this work, now you've seen it for a few days, can you draw out the links in this piece to some of the other works in the show?

AH

Yeah, so the first time that I saw the work, I was really, really emotional. I think being able to see the power of the storytelling and the significance of the sites and the sites that you've chosen, and perhaps you can talk a little bit about that when you're talking about the choir and the score.

And but for me, hearing language, I mean, it's not it's your mob, but it was just incredibly powerful. And just the scope of the work, the sheer size of it.

Yeah, I was incredibly emotional to be able to see stories and the power of those stories in a gallery space and in a major institution was really powerful and really incredible. I think the way that it links to the broader themes of the show is one of the key messages or the main message for me coming in as a First Nations curator and a First Nations person.

It's the flipping of the script and there is a theme of resistance that comes through and weaves itself throughout the exhibition, whether that's Björk talking about love as resistance in 'The Gate', you know, through to Natasha and Liam's work, which reimagines so-called Australia and where we reassert our sovereignty or whether it's Wakanda, whereas, you know, forever, which is an imagining of a world that hasn't experienced colonisation.

So we've tried to weave these stories throughout the show as a way to allow artists, makers and communities who perhaps haven't been represented in the tropes of science fiction or speculative fiction before.

And we've showcased those and we've platformed those. And for First Nations people, that's incredibly powerful because we have been experiencing the apocalypse in Australia since colonisation.

And, you know, I have that connection to science fiction in the same way you do. You know, the VHS tapes that got popped in, you know, we had a handful of them. And so I think, yeah, it's that reimagining and that power of storytelling to really flip the script.

KE

I think I'd like to add that we talked about love a lot as the...

...You can eye roll, it's fine...

No, but we talked about love and beauty a lot and during and messiness. And I think it's inevitable with pluralism.

And so like to us wanting to show making from the outset, like the very first sketches that are in Love Punks, the Neo-Mad project and the messy sort of hard parts of creativity and making.

That's partly why it isn't just a show about the work, isn't just about something that's finished.

And the story in After the End is not finished. It's not finished at all. There is no end. And I would really appreciate you talking us to a little bit about the characters and the people, because often your work, Liam, is about infrastructure and people are really, really tiny in the shot.

And I know that you do model making and you make costumes and you also are a craftsperson. And I think that's the theme with a lot of people in this exhibition, like Hannah Brontë.

You know, the creators are multifaceted people who have multiple trades and crafts. And in this case, you've really focused in on the characters. And I would just sort of love to hear a little bit more about how they came to be who they are and how they exist.

LY

Yeah, I mean, I think there's this constant play between the sheer enormity and scale of the infrastructure and the landscapes that we're talking about and the friction between those infrastructures and the body. And historically, that has been a relationship of violence and the body being displaced by infrastructure.

And what we were trying to do was to bring the body back into these landscapes.

I mean, that's the very premise of the story is to say, like, what happens when we turn off these beasts of a past age and we let a community back in? And in this case, this is one of the welders who's tasked with these new ceremonies of dismantling these infrastructures, stomping on this steel and sending it back beneath the waves to become the frameworks for artificial reef and new fishing communities to grow.

And I wanted to celebrate that mode of bringing people back in.

And Natasha would be sending me photographs of textures from country, seeds and colours, the scales of butterfish and so on and sketches of spacesuits and things like that back and forth on Instagram and just trying to kind of illustrate those thoughts and ideas and bring those textures and colours back into the work to try and reimagine these extraordinary, massive sites, you know, sites that I describe as being the technological sublime and to bring these bodies covered and draped in texture and colour and pattern into that as a counterpoint, really, as a counter narrative.

So, yeah, we see a cast of characters, including these welders pulling apart these dinosaurs of a past age, the astronauts and the scientists and technicians building the satellites, being key figures of this new First Nations space industry, launching ancestral knowledge into orbit and the scuba divers kind of tending to the artificial reef that's growing on these abandoned oil rigs.

I wanted to kind of create these new ways of thinking about what it meant to occupy these sites and then with Natasha thinking about these new ceremonial characters that would occur within them.

KE

I mean, it's certainly a step away from where you were, but also you can visibly recognise your work and the progression of your work through that.

But Natasha, you brought in more people to this project. You brought a choir.

NW

Yes. I don't know if anybody's heard the Iriwi Choir in Adelaide. They're absolutely amazing. They can sing you back thousands of years in one room, especially when they're out on country and singing.

They're made up of our elders and young children from the AP Wildlands and from Adelaide. They do a lot of work for the Fringe Festival in Adelaide. They travel as well.

But the voices you can hear, and I don't know if you heard them walking in, but there was another track playing for them. They literally transport every cell of you back in time.

Every time I hear them sing, even before when I was listening to them, I got a bit teary because they're just so powerful.

I don't know if you guys have had an Indigenous choir sing directly to you, but when they do, it just opens up your soul, your chest, everything about you and you have nowhere to run. You literally have to just take it and let it take you.

So it was a very, very proud moment to have them on board. They're beautiful people, and I hope one day you all get to hear them live because it will change your life.

KE

But you brought a composer in who did not come to Australia and you had to do the session remote.

Do you want to just describe how that went down?

LY

Yeah, I mean, again, I just have this list of amazing musicians that at one point I would love to work with and I sent out a bunch of love letters.

And Alex Summers, who is a longtime collaborator of Sigur Rós, came in and I was and replied. And I was really interested in that extraordinarily haunting sound that characterises that music, which is both charming and wistful and wondrous, but also slightly melancholic and tinged with tragedy.

And it seemed totally right for the nature of the work in many ways.

And Alex wrote this extraordinary kind of bed of sound. And then what we wanted to do with the choir was to bring them in to vocalise over the top of that and lift that music.

So we organised an amazing session.

They sent a bunch of buses out to bring the choir into a recording studio in Adelaide. Natasha came in and the wondrous team that works and conducts the choir were all there. And then Alex and I were in L.A.

We lived just around the corner from each other, which we didn't realise at the time. We were on a Zoom call and I was like, I remember that tree. Where do you live?

He's like, I'm in my...

We're two houses away from each other anyway.

So we Zoomed in and we would kind of give notes and conduct in a way remotely through a FaceTime call. And we would just be listening in to a room full of laughter and hilarity.

NW

And chasing kids. Kids were running amok in that room.

LY

Yeah. And it was a really special moment.

And they would just, in real time, we'd be playing Alex's score in the background and they'd be singing. It's a 15 minute score. They'd be singing over the top of it in one take. And then we'd do it again and we'd do it again.

And if you hear the sound, it's the sustained choral voices literally across the length of 15 minutes. But none of it is synthesised. None of it's digital. It's all totally analog.

And if you really listen, maybe we need to turn off all the rest of the sound in the show, but if you really listen, you can hear the intake of breath. You can hear when one voice comes in and then runs out of breath and then breaks and then another voice comes in to take over.

And this kind of back and forth, this sort of handing over of a tone means that the sound is really alive and really textured and really human in a way.

And across the course of the narrative, it builds into this crescendo as the crafts and satellites launch into the sky.

So hopefully if you see the work, the sound is very, very present.

And really it's a work that can only exist with both the visions and the images of the film. But Natasha's extraordinary and haunting narration and the score coming together.

KE

It's really clear and present to me. One of the things I think about in making this exhibition, but also in making the kind of work you all make in film as well, is that sort of hierarchy of collaboration and that how nothing is any one person's sole doing.

And I think about that a lot and how a lot of these coalitions, the willing, assemble in ways like you describe as love letters or I describe as just sort of willing things into existence where, you know, I'm interested, Natasha, you're making a feature or you've written a feature. So what are you pushing for next?

What love letter are you writing?

NW

Big producers, directors, anybody in the country that wants to go 60,000 years back and see us ride giant goannas down Flinders Ranges cliff.

That's literally what I'm writing is sci-fi and adventure stories. Because I think, you know, being a child actor in Rabbit Proof Fence, I'd never done anything like that before. I'd only done youth group and lived on the mission.

So going from that and having it open up what you can do, I was like, OK, I'm going to work as hard as I can to get to a point where I can actually start writing stories that empower us, stories that showcase our strength as Indigenous warriors here in this land, because we have things like Rabbit Proof Fence.

We've got a lot of historical films that are available for everyone to learn from.

But it's also important having the highest youth suicide rate and male suicide rate on the planet for our people to see themselves in all their glory.

So that's my... I'm going to be sending out love letters for everyone to come and join me on a story called 'Battle of the Ancestors', which is an adventure film set 60,000 years ago where there's megafauna animals and they're our transport, they're our pets. Tiddalik the frog is in there as an old man. He can also turn into his frog form as well.

So there's, you know, I'm using all of this opportunity as a learning experience so that I can bring that to life and really showcase how I see our people, because I see us as amazing, incredible, you know, warriors, teachers. There's a lot. We're scientists.

There's a lot to unpack there. And I don't think we've done that properly here. So that's where I'm going with it.

KE

Amanda, you've probably, and Chelsea, I'm sure as well, are sitting here. We've been open two days.

What are the sort of... anything that's sort of surprising you about now you've seen it, you're seeing the entire show?

Like what are the sort of hidden links that maybe you just didn't expect when you curated the work?

AH

I think for me, from the get go, what I'm seeing downstairs is how audiences are really connecting to these two stories, the two commissions, and quite immediately. So for me, you know, echoing everything you've said, you know, truth telling, even if it's through this lens of speculative fiction and it's done through love letters or lovers resistance or, you know, building these beautiful worlds and both, you know, Hannah Brontë, as well as Liam and Natasha have created these incredible worlds, which you know, reimagining resistance and sovereignty and the embodiment of country.

And I think for me, we've always been very powerful storytellers. And sometimes, you know, positioning these stories, it's bold. And the fact that ACMI is supporting and backing these kinds of important stories is incredible. And so it's been really wonderful to be part of that journey in terms of that curatorial work and collaborate with the both of you and Hannah.

But I think for me, what is it's that immediacy and that connection. And there's a real energy and excitement about the commissions and audiences are really connecting with these stories in a really powerful way. And you can see it in the galleries.

So that's incredibly meaningful for me as someone that's been working on the project for two years.

KE

Liam, you have spent time in writers rooms and you live in L.A.

So you're really living what's gone on post writer's strike, post pandemic. Metropolis being cancelled, shows, films you've been on being cancelled.

We deliberately set up this show in a way that shows the process of creating worlds on screen and the craft behind it.

As someone who spent time in a writer's room and being hired as a futurist, where do you think your next love letter will be in America?

LY

I don't know, America. I'm going to try and help hopefully help Natasha make her film.

That's my next project.

NW

I sent you the script last night. It's not over.

LY

In the States, oh man, it's going to be, I mean, let's be hopeful and optimistic.

I think it's going to be more important than ever to make work in and around an American context across the next four years.

It's easy to throw your arms up and, you know, imagine various escape plans to come back to Australia. But in many ways, I think that would be the exact opposite sentiment and the wrong sentiment. And really, it means that the work that you make right now across the next four years, both there, but also anywhere, I think is more and more critical and puts more pressure and responsibility on that work to be extraordinary and to create a counter narrative.

But I always talk about the idea that world builders and makers, artists, designers, really what our job is, is creating counter narratives, telling stories that create a way of thinking otherwise.

And a lot of my early work was kind of dystopian narratives around technology because the dominant media narrative was one of techno-solutionism, like this new thing, this TED Talk, this startup is going to make our lives better, buy in. It's going to connect us better to our families. It's going to make your commute easier. It's going to give you a better orgasm, whatever it may be.

And the role of artists, I think, was to complicate that and to say, yes, we can make transport more efficient, but it means giving over massive caches of our personal data. Yes, we can get AI to automate a whole series of tasks, but it involves pillaging the history of creative practice and giving artists nothing. And then after the pandemic, my work became more optimistic because we began living a live action dystopian film.

The world didn't need counter narratives that complicated naive, optimistic futures. Instead, it needed visions of hope.

And I think this commission is born out of that moment that says when the dominant narratives around climate, around industry, around carbon, despair, when every other story we see about climate change is a cautionary tale of how bad it can get, what we need is stories about who else we could be in that context.

And I think that's really the project of our generation is to find ways to be hopeful in the dark, to find ways to eke out some glimmer of aspiration and positivity when all signs point to the contrary and the opposite.

How do we do that? And what are those stories and who do we want to be?

And yes, there's less movies being made in America, anywhere in the world. Yes, there's less TV because we don't fall asleep in front of a movie or a TV anymore. We fall asleep in front of a doom scrolling, you know, micro feed of short form content. But that's not to say those platforms are any worse or more diminished than these broader narratives that we've turned up at theatres to see across the last couple of decades. They're just new context for stories.

And we've just got to be better at telling the right stories, not stories that come out of the Maniverse and are tinged with Rogan Tate-isms, but rather stories that talk about who we want to be, not fears of who we don't want to become or fears or anxieties about some fake nostalgia for a time that never was. But rather we need to tell stories about positive visions of what our futures could become. And hopefully we see more and more of those stories and the democratisation of these platforms away from the hegemony of just a small cluster of big studios, I think is actually a positive. And the fact that we've used that platform, those platforms at the moment to tell horrific narratives, narratives of fear is deeply problematic.

So if it's a story war, then we just need to get better at telling the right kinds of stories.