Mayumi Rollings: Is AI Film Still Art?

Mayumi Rollings of Tiny Ghost Studios joined Vancouver AI Meetup #30 to talk about the BC + AI Film Club, AI animation, prompt challenges, creative industry transition, and the uncomfortable question underneath all of it: when AI enters the process, is it still art?

This session is part showcase, part debate, and part community processing. Mayumi walks through six months of Film Club experiments, shows how the prompt challenges created wildly different outputs from the same starting point, and then opens the floor to artists, technologists, and skeptics wrestling with authorship, credit, commercial art, and creative access.

**What you will hear:**
- How the BC + AI Film Club grew out of a community experiment
- Why prompt challenges became a way to learn together
- How AI animation is changing the VFX and film workflow
- Why artistic vision still matters when the tool changes
- A live room debate on credit, training data, commercial art, and access
- The case for using AI for more than cheaper and faster production

**Context:** Mayumi Rollings is Co-Founder of Tiny Ghost Studios and co-organizer of the BC + AI Film Club. This talk captures a local creative community working through the AI film transition in public, with jokes, pushback, nuance, and no easy answers.

**Chapters:**
0:00 - BC + AI Film Club intro
0:54 - Mayumi introduces Tiny Ghost Studios and Film Club
2:23 - AI transition and the VFX industry
4:20 - How prompt challenges started
5:01 - Prompt challenge examples
10:28 - Community, collaboration, and the middle ground
16:19 - Accelerator work returning value to the community
17:53 - Q&A: is AI work really art?
20:43 - 30 years in animation and the artist identity question
25:05 - Use AI where it fits, or do not
28:56 - Artists, musicians, and AI resistance
30:25 - Leveling the playing field for people with vision
32:23 - AI work beyond simple prompting
34:10 - Credit, training data, and model ethics
38:21 - Choosing better tools and models
39:00 - AI beyond cheaper and faster production
42:21 - Storytelling, access, and who gets to make films

**Credits:**
Speaker: Mayumi Rollings, Co-Founder of Tiny Ghost Studios
Community: BC + AI Film Club
Host: Vancouver AI / BC + AI
Video: Pixel Wizard
Venue: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre

**Territory acknowledgment:** Filmed in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.