UKRI Opens £8m Funding Call for UK Creative Tech R&D Labs

UKRI opened a funding call on 24 August 2026 for up to two "Showcase Labs," national research and development facilities for the screen, games, and performance industries, worth up to £4m each. It sits inside DCMS's wider Createch Futures programme, part of an £18m plus investment into UK creative sector infrastructure through the CoSTAR network.

CoSTAR, the Convergent Screen Technologies and Performance in Realtime programme, has already funded a national network of production labs aimed at virtual production, motion capture, and real time rendering, the kind of infrastructure that is normally too expensive for any single studio to justify on its own. Showcase Labs extends that idea: shared facilities that let smaller studios, including ones well outside London, get hands on with technology that would otherwise sit exclusively inside a handful of major post houses.

For a studio our size, this is the part of UK creative funding that actually matters day to day. Big headline investment announcements rarely translate into anything a small studio in Buckinghamshire can use directly. Shared regional R&D infrastructure, the kind CoSTAR has been building, is different: it is the difference between reading about volumetric capture and actually testing whether it belongs in a client pitch.

Applications go through UKRI's funding service, and the call is open to consortiums including universities, industry partners, and independent studios. Whether or not we end up bidding into this specific round, it is worth UK studios tracking what CoSTAR builds with it. Shared infrastructure funded this way tends to outlast any single grant cycle, and the tools that come out of it usually end up cheaper to access for everyone once the initial build is done.

Marlow is a long way from the CoSTAR labs already running in London and the Midlands, which is exactly why a call built around Showcase Labs in more than one location matters to a studio like ours. Regional access, not just regional funding, is the part of this worth watching.