Five Minutes With: Tom Burton
REWIND sits down with Tom Burton, Head of Interactive at BBC Studios
“Five Minutes With” is a regular feature that gives you an insight into some of the greatest minds in the immersive industry, all within the time it takes to grab a cup of coffee.
Tom is a multi-award-winning Interactive Director and Executive Producer. He’s worked for the past 20+ years at the intersection between technology and content, often specialising in innovation. He’s multi-disciplined and has worked across agency land, including some he founded; theatre, including a collective he also founded; and cultural organisations and artists. He’s a BIMA100 Challenger and New Thinker, on the immersive council @ BIMA, advises BAFTA on the immersive industry, and also mentors and speaks when people ask him.
What’s exciting you most about the immersive industry right now?
The overlooked area that I think deserves more attention is audio. Sound is one of those primary senses that together with smell, taste, and touch can bypass the front half of your brain and tap into your imagination. It’s portable, discreet, low threshold, and familiar. The revolution that no one mentions is that about 10–15 years ago we suddenly all started carrying around really good headphones in our pockets. Now, we are looking at trendsetters like Apple integrating head tracking into these devices. Combine this with spatial audio tools and you’ve got a world of creative possibilities that a diverse range of producers can create and an audience will be quick to understand. Embrace the freedom of a tight brief and forget about the visuals!
What and/or who is your source of inspiration?
I’m lucky that on a day-to-day basis, my sources of inspiration can be anything from the natural world to up-and-coming artists. In my career, my sources of inspiration have been the people I work with. I have a strong belief that you should develop respect, an understanding, and an interest in the disciplines of the people around you and never lose the imagination to look outside of your bubble of influence for answers. As an individual, you can make a relatively limited number of creative leaps, but if you make it your mission to learn how to make those leaps with others you’ll find connections, solutions, and skills beyond your grasp.
From a personal point of view, it’s always been the people that push at the edges of something, doing something original and authentic that actually reaches out to people in a meaningful way. That ranges from Hunter S Thompson to James Turrell or David Graeber.
What is your favourite thing about what you do for a living?
Career-wise, working in not normal. Having variety in what I do and a purpose beyond profit to what I create. Personally, being able to have that zing of excitement cooking up a creative idea and seeing an audience’s reaction to a piece of work.
Just for Fun
What are you reading right now?
Ahem…cough…Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber. If you haven’t read any of his work then there are plenty of essays online that give you a taste, but I do recommend deep-diving into his books.
He manages to cut across a very broad subject revealing a viewpoint that at least deserves more attention but more often than not should be a rallying cry. Imagine Richard Feynman did anthropology instead, became an anarchist activist then had a love child with Douglas Adams. Oh, and his writing is an exercise in brevity, clarity, and wit that anyone writing pitch decks could learn something from.
What is something you think everyone should do at least once in their lives?
Travel. I don’t mean a holiday. I mean travel. That means you might get yourself in some “uncomfortable” situations, have to dig deep when you’re feeling down about a situation, and soldier on when you’re knackered…but you know what? You come to realise that actually it’s not as hard as you think, you’re a lot more resourceful than you might imagine and people are way nicer than you’re told. From an incredibly human-centred point of view, we’ve been given the gifts of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and for some reason, this world lights those up in us. So whether you have one or all of them, for goodness sake, get out there and experience it while you can.
Belinda Kirk speaks far more eloquently than I do on this subject, check her out.
If you could have any other job in the world, what would it be?
Vagabond.
Whilst we’re here, is there anything else you’d like to plug?
I’ll plug my upcoming project Green Planet AR. It’s coming out 2022 and it’ll be using cutting edge 5G and edge-compute to deliver something pretty special so come down to that when I start going on about it on LinkedIn.
My old partner in Theatre crime and the person who runs Raucous — which I founded with her many years ago — Sharon Clarke has cooked up some workshops that I’d heartily recommend heading along to if you can.
“Part workshop, part masterclass Raucous Exchanges is an online space for the exploration of writing for performance and building immersive stories with creative technology. Designed and delivered by industry experts and in response to a growing demand, Creative Director Sharon Clark and three recognised industry leaders will present the workshops for anyone wanting to explore and experiment with new ways of thinking about and building theatre stories.”
XRLO: eXtended Reality Lowdown is brought to you by REWIND, an immersive design and innovation company. If you want to talk tech, ideas, and the future, get in touch here.
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