Is The Future Still Orange?
The future. It is that foreign country which furnishes and replenishes the undying pastures of potential storytelling, forever looking ahead with the ‘What If?’s of tomorrow that might somehow answer the ‘What Now?’ of today. BearJam Production’s blithely sweet Visions of the Future for Osprey EV Charging fashions audiences an inventive sandbox, urging them to build like no one’s watching. So, I’ll go ahead and raise one or two small castles of my own here…
It is increasingly trumpeted that the future is often hopeful, but never certain. However, to a child, whose sense of the future is shaped by - and relative to - the journey so far travelled, the future is as close as Christmas and as far away as the Summer Holidays. In other words, our potential to think big, innovate, and achieve is a frequently relative thing. Perhaps there is a case to be made that as we grow older, becoming more serious through experience, we sometimes narrow our potential for free thought. In this film, BearJam and Osprey deftly collaborate to put this to the test, providing children with a blank canvas on which to paint and generative AI imagery as their brush. The only direction: what could, and should, a sustainable future look like to them?
From the off, it’s a great set up for some humorous musings. But it’s the common ground in thinking that emerges and the simplicity of how things should be that’s ultimately so unexpectedly moving. Really, what this piece does well is recapture our sense of endless possibility. Authors, playwrights, poets, screenwriters, philosophers, visual artists, for more generations than we have (ironically) bothered to record, consistently return to the question of the future in fuelling our hopes, horrors, and matters of the heart. They patiently wait in line, take turns refilling their creative Jerry Cans at the wellspring, determining what is enough to sustain the narrative journey ahead. But why bother using the future as story theme? Afterall, we won’t be around to see it, right? Is it simply a jaded gimmick? I don’t think so, not this time.
VOTF cuts a unique through line on all these points, asking the next generation how they might use the emerging tools of tomorrow in shaping our collective, and woefully late, answer. Although undoubtedly a novel and engaging premise, there’s also something so disarmingly sad in watching a child stand on the soundstage of a virtual production studio, brush-in-hand, ready to paint broad strokes across the jaded façade of a house that adults built. But that is the point, and this is where BearJam’s creative punch consistently lies, in a well measured mix of message and emotion that mobilising audiences towards action.
Osprey’s Visions of the Future serves as a wider reminder that our role in safeguarding the real sustainability that is to come, whether in the energy sector or our own communications space, is an active one. We can no longer remain passive about the future, but instead act upon and shape it. Rather than half-heartedly tabling subtle amendments to social approaches or commitments full of half steps and false starts – like those seen so far in our response to the climate change ultimatum - we must remember how to think Big. The perspective afforded by childhood imagination is silly, yes, but it is also unfettered, limitless and undeniably profound.
Osprey and BearJam lay bare just how poorly the minimal measures of adults stack up once children are introduced, forcing the creative ceiling to fly away. When we’re finally free to say, “What If” today, instead of “What Now?” tomorrow.
