Antony ButtsFuturist & documentary filmmakerLet’s talk

Antony Butts / Futurist & documentary filmmaker

Find the futures
your plans
leave out.

I’m Antony Butts, a futurist and documentary filmmaker. I conceive unfamiliar possibilities, investigate why people might pursue them, and build the worlds that could grow around them.

Explore the futuresDiscuss a commission
FuturesIdeas, worlds & strategic choicesFilmsDocumentary & NGO videography
Antony Butts in a green shirt and black jacket against a dark background

Possible futures / Antony Butts

The familiar becomes
something else.

Each possibility opens onto a different world. Follow one in.

Selected work

A possibility.
A reason to happen.
A world to step inside.

Four independent explorations, developed through people, institutions and the choices between them.

Design-fiction letter on a kitchen table, beside glasses, a pill organiser and an old family photo: “Your mandatory over-70 service assessment”, from the Joint Service Assessment Unit and the British Army, dated 17 May 2041. Mr Colin Ward, 76, is eligible with adaptations as a front-line combat drone operator. Declining means no state-funded residential care and a reduced State Pension.
A fictional service assessment, 2041. From Care Home Troopers.

01 / Care Home Troopers

Your country needs your gran.

Physical assistance, falling birth rates and rising care costs make older people a new recruitment pool. Service pays for their care and protects the family inheritance.

Then the assessment letter arrives. Colin, 76, can decline service—but that decision costs him state-funded care and part of his pension. A new military capability becomes a bargain between generations.

What changes when a society starts protecting its young by recruiting its old?

Read the world behind the letter
What this world assumes

The scenario assumes adapted roles are viable for selected older adults, and that a government can make care and pension entitlements conditional on service. Neither follows automatically from the technology.

From the kitchen garden
“I’m carrying seventeen tomatoes,” Tom said, offended. “Some of us have responsibilities.”

Basil wants light.
Barry wants carbon.
The owner wants dinner.

A voice from the fictional kitchen garden.

02 / Companion Growers

The basil isn’t speaking to the tomato.

A garden centre enters the pet business by using AI to get ecosystems to talk. Plants and fungi become characters in a household drama: who gets the light, who supplies the nutrients, and who is ready for dinner.

The owner tends a living relationship. Buying another plant changes the cast; harvesting changes the story. The garden centre starts selling companionship as well as things to grow.

What could your product become if customers felt responsible for its wellbeing?

Meet Basil, Tom and Barry
What this world assumes

AI gives sensed and modelled ecological relationships a dramatic voice. It does not establish that plants have human thoughts. The commercial question is whether people form relationships that last.

Inside RoboStore

Carers · cooks · tutors · tradespeople

One store.
Everyone’s learning.

New services. New competitors.
A new owner of expertise.

One possible arrangement of expertise, customers and learning.

03 / RoboStore

Every app teaches the store.

An app store for humanoid robots takes over expert human labour. Specialists supply the skills. The store controls the customers and accumulates learning across their work.

A profession becomes an app. Then the app becomes a feature. Businesses can end up financing the growth of a platform able to replace them—and controlling the flow of jobs also controls opportunities to learn.

Who gets to accumulate the competence of the whole system?

Follow the struggle over expertise
What this world assumes

This depends on useful learning transferring across tasks, the platform securing access to that learning, and suppliers remaining dependent on it. Technical limits, competing stores and data rights could change the outcome.

First Chance to Eat

Your place
in natural
history.

Reserve the hunt.
Before the animal is born.

A fictional commercial offer
An imagined offer from the scenario.

04 / First Chance to Eat

What’s coming back on the menu?

Trophy hunters fund de-extinction. A restaurant sells the privilege of hunting and eating what comes back. Customers can buy their place before the animal is born.

One company owns the biotechnology. Another owns the estates, commercial rights and customer relationships. When the protests begin, the business discovers a second market: people who enjoy provoking them.

What becomes valuable when an invention creates a new kind of rarity?

Explore the trophy economy
What this world assumes

The world assumes viable revived animals, permitted breeding and hunting, and buyers willing to finance long waits. The dates and businesses belong to the scenario.

Explore all 39 futures

Futures credentials

“When Antony speaks, there’s a change of gear. He connects ideas across sectors and gets people beyond the usual answers, into the difficult questions that matter. He stretches their thinking and brings out their best ideas. He makes the future something you experience, rather than just talk about.”

Imran Khan, Senior Principal Futurist, DSTL

Bring me a subject,
a possibility or
a difficult question.

For strategy teams, public institutions, futures consultancies and creative studios.

I can help you find unfamiliar possibilities within a brief, develop the businesses and institutions around a premise, or turn a scenario into something people can read, watch or play.

A commission might produce a developed scenario with its assumptions, a collection of artefacts from that world, a story or film treatment, or a workshop and decision game. We agree the question, the audience and what the finished work needs to do.

Discuss a commissionWays to work together

Ideas that connect the futures.

Follow an idea across businesses, institutions and everyday life.

Explore the connections

Negative Territorial Power

The country survives. Its communities don’t.

When it becomes easier to stop a territory being used than to govern it, sovereignty and viability come apart.

5 connected futures

Flash Institutions

A million decisions. One negotiating bloc.

AI agents pool their owners’ money, preferences and votes into blocs that bargain as one, then start hiring politicians.

5 connected futures

The Permission Economy

We can make almost anything. Who will let us?

When making gets cheap, permission gets expensive: the patent, the licence, the certified cartridge, the store’s yes.

5 connected futures

The Unbundled State

Defence, citizenship, representation. Choose your plan.

Defence, citizenship and representation, sold by the slice. Your army’s on a subscription. So is the enemy’s.

6 connected futures
Earlier portrait of Antony Butts in profile, lit by a window
An earlier portrait of Antony.

A filmmaker’s eye

I go to strange places
and bring back the story.
Some of them don’t exist yet.

In documentary, I follow the people, conflicts and telling details that make a situation understandable. I bring that same attention to the people inside a possible future.

My work includes directing After the Apocalypse and DIY Country, and cinematography on Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer.

Explore the filmsAbout Antony

Tell me what you’re trying to figure out.

A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.

Discuss your project

You know the issue.
I find the story that brings it alive.

Short-form videography for NGOs. I find the people, conflicts and telling details that make an issue matter, then develop, film and edit the story.

Discuss a filmExplore videography

Film credentials

What the media say.

More reviews
“Antony Butts managed the almost impossible.” (opens in a new tab)
Alexandra Wagner, Radio Liberty (opens in a new tab)Translated from RussianThe Curious Tale of the Handmade Country
“Compelling and indelibly disturbing.” (opens in a new tab)
David Parkinson, Empire · 4/5 (opens in a new tab)After the Apocalypse
“Must-see video” (opens in a new tab)
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (opens in a new tab)Recommendation, 19 March 2014Tatars in Crimea Face Up to a Russian Future

Short films. Human stories.

A selection of public commissions and reporting.

Videography for NGOs

My recent filming work includes bespoke client commissions. The films here are a selection of my public work.

Award-winning films.

The people, dilemmas and political changes I filmed.

Explore the films

Where I’ve worked.

Documentary filming and research, including West Africa.

  • KazakhstanA yearOn the former Soviet nuclear test site, for After the Apocalypse.
  • KyrgyzstanA yearWhere I made Kidnapped Brides for Al Jazeera.
  • RussiaFour yearsStudying, filming and working in Russian, from Moscow to Ingushetia.
  • Mali, West AfricaFMNR researchResearch on farmer-managed natural regeneration in the Sahel.

Filmed in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Iraq, the Philippines, Tahiti and Brazil. West Africa: FMNR research in Mali, on farmer-managed natural regeneration in the Sahel. I work in English and Russian.

Storyboard for a 30-second design-fiction film, “Marion’s retirement plan”, in six frames: gossip in a café, bowls with new teammates, her allotment, a dance, operating combat drones on the front line, and Marion holding her grandson’s photo: “I’d rather it was me than my grandson.”

Marion’s retirement plan.

Bowls, an allotment, a dance. Then the front line.

Find
CHT-05
Object
Storyboard for a 30-second film
Date
Not yet

A film from a future.

Some commissions need both: documentary footage of a real situation, a clearly labelled scenario a few years on, then a conversation about the choices. This storyboard comes from Care Home Troopers.

Talk about a film and a futureExplore Care Home Troopers

Tell me about the subject.
I’ll find the story.

A film, a series of short stories, or a documentary element inside a wider project.

Discuss your project