Building bridges between creative industries

Film and television, games, animation and publishing share audiences, talent and increasingly the same intellectual property. Yet the professionals working within these industries still often operate in separate networks, attend different markets and speak different professional languages.

We believe that creates a missed opportunity.

Audiences do not experience culture in silos. The same person may watch a series, play a game, read a novel, follow a creator online and become part of a community around a story world. Yet creative projects are still often developed as individual products rather than as part of a broader relationship with their audience.

Helsinki Film Lab exists to help change that.

Our aim is to create practical spaces where professionals from different creative industries can meet, learn from one another and develop a better understanding of how stories, audiences and intellectual property can move across formats. Through training programmes, cross-industry initiatives and networking events in Helsinki, London and internationally, we bring together people who might otherwise rarely find themselves in the same room.

The idea began when our founder, Alisha Hasan, returned to Helsinki after more than a decade abroad. While working across animation, television and games — including on Moominvalley and its collaboration with Rovio — she became increasingly interested in why this kind of cross-industry thinking was not more common.

In film and television particularly, years can be spent developing, financing, producing and launching a project, only for the next project to begin the process of finding an audience almost entirely again. At the same time, other creative industries have developed very different ways of thinking about communities, franchises, story worlds and long-term audience relationships.

The more we looked at the problem, the clearer one of its causes became: people cannot easily collaborate across industries if they rarely meet in the first place.

That insight became the foundation of Helsinki Film Lab.

Internationalism has been part of HFL from the beginning. Creative work increasingly travels across borders, and so should the professional relationships around it. We believe that meeting peers from different countries, disciplines and cultural perspectives leads to stronger ideas, wider networks and more ambitious creative possibilities.

Our goal is not to erase the differences between creative industries. Those differences are precisely what make collaboration valuable.

We want to build the bridges that allow those worlds to understand one another — and to create better opportunities for stories, intellectual property and audiences to travel between them.