It's a question universities, businesses and creative professionals are all grappling with right now. As artificial intelligence continues to transform the way we work, create and communicate, the challenge is no longer simply understanding the technology. It’s understanding how to prepare people for a future that is changing in real time.
That’s one of the reasons why UP THERE, EVERYWHERE's Head of Post Production, Calum MacLean, recently joined the Industry Advisory Board for Applied Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University.
Bringing experience from the worlds of film, motion, storytelling, and creative technology, Calum joins a group of industry leaders contributing industry insights to conversations about the future of informatics, creativity, and digital innovation.
We sat down with Calum to discuss AI, creativity, education, industry readiness, and why human judgment may become more valuable, not less, in the years ahead.
You've just joined the Industry Advisory Board for Applied Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University. What made you want to get involved, especially alongside your role as Head of Post Production at UP THERE, EVERYWHERE?
I was delighted to be asked to join by the head of informatics. I wanted to contribute to Napier’s understanding of the rapidly evolving landscape of our industry and be part of the conversations shaping its future. I did not have the most traditional higher education or career journey, so as clichéd as it sounds, I genuinely wanted to give back.
We are at a point where the tools we use every day across the entire production pipeline, whether that is storyboarding in pre-production, AI voice synthesis during production, or colour grading in post, are changing faster than most formal curricula can keep up with. I wanted to be in the room where that gap is being addressed rather than observing it from the outside. And more than that, I wanted to be an advocate for something I feel strongly about: maintaining human creativity at the centre of the work we produce. That conversation is happening everywhere right now, but it needs voices who are still actively in the room making things, not just theorising about them.
The perspective I bring is not theoretical. It is built from production deadlines, client briefs, and systems I have had to construct myself because nothing off-the-shelf quite fits. I hope that comes across and helps.
The conversation around AI and digital innovation can often feel very technical. But your background sits at the intersection of storytelling, motion, film, and creative technology. Why do you think creative perspectives need a seat at these kinds of discussions?
Technology without curated judgment produces creative work that does not resonate. It feels empty. The conversations around AI and digital innovation tend to orbit capability, what a system can do and how quickly it can do it, rather than purpose, what it should do and for whom. We should not lose sight of the fact that AI is still a set of tools. Tools that should add to a creative's arsenal alongside knowledge and production techniques drawn from as wide a gamut of disciplines as possible.
That breadth is something I experience directly at UP. I count myself fortunate to be working within an extended team that spans every discipline you would expect from a full-service global marketing agency, not only writers with PhDs, photographers, and strategists, but account directors, brand consultants, creatives, and colleagues drawn from cultures and backgrounds across the globe. Specialists in their own disciplines who can also talk to each other. That cross-pollination is where the most interesting creative decisions happen, and it is something no AI system replicates on its own.
My work sits across motion, narrative, and technical execution. When I am designing a sequence, I am not just thinking about frame rates and codec settings. I am thinking about tempo, weight, emotional arc, how a colour grade shifts an image's psychological register, and how to convey the emotional resonance of a deeply human script. That kind of thinking is exactly what gets left out when creative voices are absent from these discussions. And when it is absent, you end up with results that feel hollow.
Universities are trying to prepare students for industries that are changing almost in real time. From your perspective, what are the skills young people actually need now that perhaps aren't being taught enough yet?
Two things stand out instantly. The first is workflow IQ, not just knowing how to use a tool, but understanding how it connects to the larger pipeline and how a decision you make affects the person upstream and downstream from you. Students often arrive knowing the software but not the workflow. That gap shows up quickly in a professional environment. Closely linked is the ability to communicate across technical and creative domains. In a real production environment, you are constantly translating between disciplines, briefing a photographer, aligning with a strategist and evolving concepts with writers. That skill could be encouraged earlier, through collaborative projects or industry placements.
The second is the ability to direct AI rather than simply rely on it. That is a genuinely new skill, and in the industry, we are already seeing the direct effects of content that has not been thoughtfully made. I am actively building workflow systems and processes that blend a cross-section of skill sets, and the central challenge is always the same: how do you maintain creative authorship when clients are pressurising for faster, cheaper execution, which is increasingly automated? That question needs to be sitting at the centre of every creative programme, not as a threat but as a design problem students are equipped to solve.
Critically, that also means knowing when not to use AI. That point came up directly in our first board meeting and was widely agreed upon. Speed and novelty are not always the right answer. Knowing when a human judgment call is the appropriate solution is itself a skill, one that requires strong foundational knowledge to exercise. Without that foundation, you cannot critically evaluate what AI produces. You accept outputs rather than author work.
Underpinning all of it is the importance of protecting human creativity as the heart of the work. Tools evolve, pipelines change, but the ability to make something that resonates with another person is a human skill. Students need to be developing that with the same enthusiasm as any technical competency.
You mentioned the importance of “real-world industry practice.” What's something students or emerging creatives are often surprised by when they step into actual agency or production environments for the first time?
The pace. In education, the emphasis is on exploration and documentation. In a real agency environment, decisions get made with incomplete information, and they get made fast. Students are often surprised that the work is less about perfection and more about judgment under time pressure, whilst balancing creativity. That shift from having time to think to needing to commit is something no classroom can fully replicate.
The second is accountability. In education, feedback is structured and relatively safe. In a real production environment, a creative decision that does not land costs something. A client relationship, a timeline, sometimes a budget. Dealing with those consequences, shaking it off, and continuing to be creative is a different kind of pressure entirely.
There is also the question of ego. Students often arrive with a strong sense of their own creative vision, which is a good thing. What surprises them is how collaborative, iterative, and sometimes unglamorous the work actually is. The ability to subordinate your personal aesthetic to the needs of a brief, a client, or a team while still bringing genuine creative value is one of the hardest transitions to make. The ones who navigate it well tend to be the ones who last.
The evening also included Micro to Macro: Worlds within Worlds, which explored the overlap among science, creativity, and technology. It feels like a good reflection of where much of the innovation is happening right now. Do you think the future belongs more to specialists or to people who can connect different worlds?
Neither, and both. The future belongs to people who can move between worlds without losing depth in any of them. Pure specialism is valuable but increasingly fragile on its own. What the meeting surfaced, and what I keep finding to be true, is that the most interesting creative and technical decisions happen at the edges of disciplines, not at the centre of them.
At UP, my colleagues bring perspectives I would never arrive at on my own. The work that resonates is rarely the product of one discipline operating in isolation. It is what happens when those perspectives genuinely collide. Whether it is the way Madlib and Mahler both build tension and resolution across completely different musical worlds, or the visual conversation between Dali and Del Toro across a century, the same pattern keeps emerging. The most interesting work happens when someone refuses to stay in one world. Once you start looking for those connections, you cannot stop seeing them.
The Micro-to-Macro framing in the exhibition captures something real about where innovation actually lives. You need to zoom out far enough to see the pattern, then zoom back in with precision. The people who will define the next decade of creative technology are the ones building both range and depth.
One theme surfaced repeatedly throughout our conversation: technology may change, but meaningful creativity remains deeply human.
The tools available to today’s students are evolving at an extraordinary pace. Yet the skills that matter most, curiosity, judgement, collaboration, communication and the ability to create something that resonates with another person, remain remarkably consistent.
For Calum, the future isn’t about choosing between creativity and technology, or between specialists and generalists. It’s about learning how to move confidently between disciplines while maintaining depth, perspective and creative ownership.
As universities and industries work together to navigate this next chapter, those conversations have never been more important. Because while the tools will continue to change, the people using them, and the ideas that connect us, remain at the centre of everything worth creating.