By Kris Krug
October 29, 2025
Last night at the HR MacMillan Space Centre, 250 people showed up for what we're now calling the First Annual BC AI Film Festival. We screened six films, ran a panel with the guy who created Gollum's face for Lord of the Rings, and spent five hours wrestling with what happens when the cost of making a film drops from $200,000 to $100.
We're doing it again next year. October 2026.
Anthony Joseph and Johnny Williams from Squamish Nation opened the evening with traditional protocol. Singing, ceremony, the reminder that we're on unceded territory and everything we build here should honor that.
When Anthony and Johnny come up and start singing, I know everything that happens next is gonna be okay. Whatever shows up is the right people. Whatever happens is what's supposed to happen.
Anthony said something that framed the whole night: "Time is our greatest asset, and that's the one thing you can't get back."
We were about to watch films made in days instead of months, by individuals instead of teams, for hundreds of dollars instead of hundreds of thousands. Time reclaimed. The question the whole festival circled: what are we doing with it?
Before we screened anything, we assembled the people who could actually speak to what's happening:
Bay Raitt created Gollum's facial expressions for Lord of the Rings. If you've cried at a CGI character, Bay probably had something to do with it.
Luke has 24 years in animation and just launched Tiny Go Studios to teach displaced animation workers how to transition to AI workflows because he lived through the hand-drawn to 3D shift and watched people get left behind.
Ryan Patterson directed "Grail," which premiered at TIFF. Toronto International Film Festival. AI-assisted films are already there.
Kevin Friel teaches 1,500 students through Curious Refuge how to make Comfy UI do things that shouldn't be possible.
Philippe Pasquier is an SFU professor researching indigenous AI protocols and consensual model training—making sure we build good tools, not just cool ones.
And me, trying to keep brilliant humans on topic while the audience yelled questions about IP theft and whether we're destroying the animation industry.
We didn't resolve those questions. But we confronted them.