Exploring Synergies: Gaming × Audiovisual – apply for a workshop by Sarajevo Film Festival and Mad Head Games

Exploring Synergies is a strand of CineLink Industry Days Talents & Skills devoted to how intellectual property moves, is developed and holds value across creative industries. It brings professionals from different sectors into one room to work through the practical realities of adaptation, rights and cross-media development, treating IP not as a legal afterthought but as a creative and strategic competence.

Gaming and audiovisual sectors rarely sit at the same table, let alone work on a shared property. This time, Exploring Synergies is a space to begin that exchange. The involvement of Mad Head Games, a Saber Interactive studio, grounds the exploration in real practice: participants work alongside an established studio with deep experience in original IP, world-building and international production, rather than in a theoretical exercise. The workshop is moderated by the creative director of Demago Studio, Igor Simić.

This is not an entry-level programme. Applicants bring professional experience, motivation to work across sectors, and ideally a project, IP or question of their own to test in the room.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Host & venue: Mad Head Games, 90a Kneza Miloša Street, Floor 20, Belgrade

Dates: 24th to 27th September

Format: 2.5-day on-site intensive, followed by an online deep-dive session

Participants: up to 25

Eligibility: professionals based in Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Türkiye and Ukraine

Working language: English

Cost: no tuition fee and the programme covers accommodation, while participants cover their own travel

Application: via this link

Application deadline: 5th August

PROGRAM

The workshop is organised around five thematic blocks. The first four build a shared foundation across the two sectors; the fifth puts that foundation to work on a real Mad Head property, with input from the studio’s own team. The blocks combine expert framing, peer exchange, direct instruction and hands-on work.

Block 1: Two Industries, One Room

Where gaming and audiovisual misread each other, and why. A shared map of how each sector is structured – development cycles, key roles, decision points – and the assumptions that get in the way of collaboration. The aim of this opening block is a common working vocabulary before anything else.

Block 2: Follow the Money: Financing & Monetisation

How each sector raises capital and earns it back. On the audiovisual side: public funding, co-production, pre-sales, broadcaster and platform commissioning, recoupment. On the video games side: publisher and platform deals, premium versus free-to-play, DLC and live-service revenue, community-driven monetisation. Where the models converge, where they diverge, and what each side tends to underestimate about the other.

Block 3: IP as a Long Game

Intellectual property as a strategic asset rather than a legal afterthought. Ownership and rights structures, the long-term value of a world and its characters, and the cross-media potential of an IP across games, film, series and beyond, including how to open a property to new formats without losing strategic control of it.

Block 4: Narrative Across Formats

What happens to a story when it moves between an interactive and a linear medium. World-building, character and player agency; the tension between game structure and screen narrative; who follows an IP and how audiences behave across formats. Practical thinking about narrative transfer, in both directions and about long-term audience value.

Block 5: Applied Case: Inside a Mad Head Games IP

The hands-on core of the workshop. Working directly with a Mad Head property, and with the studio’s own team, participants move through the themes above as applied to a real IP: its financing, its narrative, its audience and its cross-media potential.