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I Love Your Stories is a soulful conversation series hosted by artist and creative guide Hava Gurevich, where art meets authenticity. Each episode invites you into an intimate dialogue with artists, makers, and visionaries who are courageously crafting lives rooted in creativity, purpose, and self-expression.
From painters and poets to healers and community builders, these are the stories behind the work—the moments of doubt, discovery, grief, joy, and transformation. Through honest, heart-centred conversations, Hava explores how creativity can be both a healing force and a path to personal truth.
If you’re an artist, a dreamer, or someone drawn to a more intuitive and intentional way of living, this podcast will remind you that your story matters—and that the act of creating is a sacred, revolutionary act.
[MUSIC]
What happens when you embrace change,
take risks, and dare
to reinvent yourself?
I'm your host, Hava Gurvitch, and in this
episode of I Love Your Stories,
I welcome back Canadian documentary
filmmaker, Dennis Moore,
fresh from his AI film
festival in Amsterdam.
Feeling rejuvenated and inspired, Dennis
shares his take on some of the exciting
new shifts happening in the film world.
We revisit our conversation
about aging as an artist and
finding ways to keep
the creative spark alive,
explore the rapid pace
of AI's evolution, and
dig into the rise of the AI artist expert
shaping this fast changing landscape.
Welcome back to the show, Dennis.
Now, quick word from our sponsor, and
then we'll get right back to the show.
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August, hey everyone, welcome
back to I Love Your Stories.
And I'm here again with the filmmaker,
documentary filmmaker, Dennis Moore.
We had an amazing conversation about
documentary filmmaking and
Dennis's career in the
first part of the series.
So if you are tuning in for the first
time to hear Dennis,
do yourself a favor and
go listen to the first episode first so
you can get a better idea of
who Dennis is and what he's done.
But we're gonna pick up
kind of where we left off.
Welcome, Dennis.
Thank you.
So Dennis, tell us what's been going on.
Well, since we last spoke, I went to
Amsterdam for an AI film festival.
And I came back sporting this new look, a
Zoom beard and a Zoom background.
And I think I'm gonna stick with that.
So, long story short, I'm a documentary
filmmaker and a technologist and
broadcast and if you listen to the first
episode, you'll get a mouthful from me
about all the details of my past.
But I did work in startups
in the 90s and early 2000s.
So technology and media and image making
have always been my bag.
And later it turned into something more
personal with documentary filmmaking
about more esoteric kind of subjects or
iconoclastic characters and
quirky subject matter.
And I met you when we were doing our
documentary on Disfarmer.
And yeah, we've been friends
ever since and collaborators.
And recently I've been turned on to AI
filmmaking and for the last six months,
I've been learning all I can.
And I pretty much have gone from zero to
60 in three, or six months.
And this film festival was a return, one,
for me to going to film festivals
since the pandemic and
two, in this whole new realm.
And it was an incredible experience.
So-
Wait, before you get into the experience,
because I think this part
is worth mentioning again,
it was central point to the whole
conversation last time.
Kind of what happened to the film
industry in the last few years,
your own kind of self evolution as a
creative and what brought you to AI?
Well, so I finished my last, I should say
traditional documentary
just before the pandemic,
or actually just during the pandemic.
And it was about a friend of mine, a New
York artist and one of
the last Pigeon Keepers
in Manhattan.
And he was in his eighties and we did a
documentary about his life and work,
Anton Van Dalen.
He did die last year.
The film was well received and it's a
very good documentary about
an artist and his life's work
and very proud of that.
After that, the pandemic hit and I was
kind of reduced to making small little
factual subjects as animated films.
And those were about quirky subject
matter that a friend of mine who's an
eccentric writer from
the UK writes these stories about all
sorts of subject matter like that.
And those turned out well, they were
traditional animation and I
had a little crew of people,
an editor myself, a writer, an artist,
animator, and a sound designer.
And that was the last work I did.
And then I decided to retire from
filmmaking because the world
had changed and the funding
had changed and the subject matter, I
felt I had kind of run with
it for as long as I could.
And I was focusing more on my career and
technology changes that are coming up in
the traditional broadcast world.
However, I did stumble across AI
filmmaking and then that kind
of, I would say, resurrected my
interest in my desire
to make films again.
But in a nutshell, I was really turned on
by it and it brought me back to, in fact,
how I got into filmmaking in the first
place, Super 8 in public school.
And then later in the .com realm where
technology took over and I worked for
startups and basically
digital image making from video games to
the early days of online video and new
media to all sorts of
applications before I
got into broadcasting.
And this, in a way, while I'm in my 50s,
seems to kind of go back
and circle right back and
revisit all those days, my early days
when I got started in digital technology.
Does it have just on a kind of
psychological level because it is a new
technology and you're
like a technophile.
Does that play into it?
That's like something new that's like
starting up and you want to
be on the ground floor of it?
Exactly.
And that's exactly it.
So I've had time to think since I've got
back from Amsterdam
and the AI Film Festival,
what is your interest in this?
Why have you become so obsessed with it?
Why do you spend all
your hours working on it?
So I've gone zero to 60 in six months
learning it and meeting people.
And since we last spoke, so
many strange developments.
And I thought like I'll bring you up to
speed on all those in a minute, but
I've just followed my notes.
And yes, I go back to that.
This is my keen interest, even going back
to public school where I
love technology and filmmaking,
like the creative and the technical.
And so this is no different.
It just kind of satisfied all those
interests and cravings.
And the process itself of actually making
AI films surprised me
that I actually have
all those same kind of satisfactions kind
of solved when I work on an AI film.
It's like, oh, I got the great shot
finally after 20 takes.
I finally can see how this fit together.
I can kind of direct actors.
I can work with a writer, in this case,
Chad G.B.T., and write a script.
I can work with the cinematographer, the
art director, which is
the video generators and
image generators.
And I just find it's uncanny how
satisfying it is and how
close it is to the process itself
of regular filmmaking.
I mean, you can't really compare them,
but it's just a fun little ride.
Can I ask?
So since our last conversation, I started
playing with Chad G.B.T. as well.
And I had this thought.
So in our first episode, we talked a lot
about the dynamic of having a crew.
That you have someone to bounce ideas off
of, to get a more
holistic look at what you're
doing.
You're asking the
cameraman if he has questions.
You're asking the sound
guy if he has questions.
You've got an-- so it's a group effort.
Like, it's a collaboration.
And when I started working with Chad
G.B.T., one of the things
I noticed right away, first
of all, just how like
it's such a yes, man.
It's like your personal cheerleader.
And whatever you ask, it starts with
like, oh, that's great, Hava.
That's a strong start.
Let me just tweak it a little bit for you
and things like that.
Do you feel like it's AI?
And it's, as far as we
know, not quite sentient yet.
But does it feel like a kind of
collaboration or does it
feel more like your assistant?
I'll tell you this.
In my experience, Chad G.B.T. is a lot
more friendly and it feels
more like a collaboration.
And I jokingly use like,
yes, please thank you with it.
And I'll get the appropriate responses.
Sometimes I use Gemini, Google's version,
and I like it because
it's a colder personality,
if you will.
And I don't feel like it's more of a
professional relationship than a
friendship with Chad G.B.T.,
if you will.
Both of them I use for
different applications.
Like, if I'm using video generators in
the world of the Google environment,
it's sometimes better to use Gemini
because it's more
optimized for those tools.
Gemini and Google, and I completely
understand, they have way
more guardrails of protections.
And so you can't always get
what you want out of them.
So Chad G.B.T. is a little
bit more open, within reason.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
It's almost like, let's just say these
are your assistants,
your collaborators, and they all each
come with their own personality.
Yes.
That's true.
And this is.
But here's what had
happened since I last met you.
So I went to this AI film festival, and
it was not just a film
festival, but it was also a meeting
of the minds, and it was conferences, and
just get togethers, and
socializing with other
filmmakers, and technologists, and people
just interested in AI
media from around the world.
And so being in Amsterdam, it was very
cosmopolitan, very international, and the
people were fantastic.
So the first thing I noticed is I looked
around and I thought, "Oh,
what age are these people?
Who are they? What are their backgrounds?
Are there men, women,
different nationalities?"
And yes, they were all of those things.
But I noticed that most of the crowd was
kind of like in our age realm.
Yeah.
And but again, I think a lot of people
that I met were already had
been in the industry for years.
So this is like me, a kind of a natural
evolution of where the media is going.
But there were all sorts
of different backgrounds.
And I also found that internationally, it
was great to see what
other countries in the world
are kind of the strongest
developers of this new media.
And I found Turkey to be a big one,
Poland, certainly
everywhere in the world, no doubt.
China, of course, pretty much from
everywhere, North America, of course.
So it was really eye-opening and
everybody got along great.
The films, it's interesting to go to an
AI film festival
because the subject matter
and the styles are so varied.
So it's just this incredible smorgasbord,
if you will, of delight, I suppose.
And another thing that struck me being in
the theater watching the films,
normally when I would go to a film
festival, a traditional
one, I hate to say this,
but there's always this dread of the
short film program being like,
it's torture sometimes, the stories and
the ideas are just
sometimes hard to take.
I actually sat through these short films
for almost eight hours
and I loved every single
one of them. There was such a difference.
The ideas were so new
and fresh and not at all
what I've seen in other short film
programs. That's just a personal
observation I thought
was funny. Would you say that there's...
What I'm hearing so far, and I'm sorry to
interrupt. Yeah, please.
A couple of things. One of the thick
notes that I wrote down,
because you're mentioning
Poland, Turkey, China, and I don't know
where they typically
stand. I know China is up there
in technology. I don't know about Turkey
and Poland, but one
thing occurred to me is that
using AI tools, it is a kind of equalizer
in terms of what part of
the world you're coming
from, what your budget is. You don't have
to have a multimillion
dollar budget and hire
a film crew and a stage
and everything like that.
That kind of democratization of media and
democratization of ideas.
And the other thought I had, so that
while the ideas are
new and fresh and young,
the industry that is absorbing it is
still a kind of established industry.
And there are players in that industry
that have been around for a while.
Well, the first part, you're exactly
right. It's a democratization of ideas
and content, and it puts
tools into the hands of anyone who wants
to create something.
And that was exactly true.
And a lot of the people I met, one, for
example, was this producer, not much
younger than me. And he was a producer
from the Republic of Georgia working on a
television series, limited budget. And
like here in Canada, their mandate in
public television is
to promote their culture and their
country. And he was tasked
with telling these stories about
the history of his country and this town
and these medieval
battles that had taken place.
There was no way he could afford or the
broadcaster could
afford to recreate those,
of course. And he showed me some of his
AI work and he had a
small crew, two 18-year-olds
and himself working on this series. And I
couldn't believe it.
The battle scenes were
incredible. You would never be able to
even recreate something that
detailed. It was fantastic.
So I met a lot of people like that. And
again, with the same
stories, that they wouldn't be able
to do this without this technology, it
would cost a fortune. And even so, you
wouldn't even be able
to stage it and make it look as good as
AI. And this is just at the
present day, just wait till
next year and the year after that. So it
does certainly put power
into the hands of lower budget
projects. And to your second part, it
wasn't just showing films, it was also
socializing. And there
were lots of forums and conferences and
speakers from all over the world and
people sharing ideas.
And they're certainly young people, don't
get me wrong. It was a variety of people,
all backgrounds and ages, men, women. And
the funny thing is, is that
it became less of a singular
kind of creative process now, having
these other people at your
fingertips when you need help.
So there is the collaboration now, it's
just a little bit more virtual than
before. So you still
collaborate with people who are good at
music programs or sound
design, or maybe somebody's
really good with one type of software
process and you're not. And so the
collaboration kind of came
back. And I'm excited to go to another
one. I just have to produce
something to get in. But you can
also go to these things, whether or not
you have a film and they are
conferences and forums. And
I was really, really impressed and I had
such a good time. And I think
everyone else felt the same.
So now it's in its infancy. So the
sponsors of these kinds of
things are the software companies
who are developing these tools. So
they're the ones with money and deep
pockets with venture
capitalists and whatnot, whether they'll
all shake out or not,
they're looking for artists to join
them, to promote their software. So
they're the ones driving the industry now
looking to be absorbed
or taken over. But eventually, look,
businesses been around forever,
especially Hollywood. They
are on the verge of probably taking over
all this stuff. I really
don't believe there'll be a
complete democratization. I think it'll
just be like, it's always
been is that people will be
kind of like, yeah, go ahead, make your
film. It's fun. Show your
family and friends. And the
rest of it will just be owned and
dictated and driven by the
industry. Now, having said that,
when it came back home, a little group of
us in Toronto, we had
started the Toronto AI film group
and only had one meeting. So when I came
back, I gave them the same kind of
download of what I had
seen there. And recently we had our
second meeting and it just
blossomed. We had a professional
space. A few of us presented. We had more
than 50 people. We had the
maximum. We had probably had
almost close to 100 people wanting to
come, but we just couldn't fit everyone
in. So it's just kind
of exploded. And these AI film groups
around the world are
finding the same thing. And again,
same cross section I saw at the festival,
young, old, men, women,
whatever, people from different
backgrounds. And I just thought like,
this is like fantastic. It's exploded.
What have we created
here as being one of these founding
members? So I kind of think like, wow,
and within four weeks or
something, all of a sudden we notice that
there are job boards with
all sorts of jobs for AI
artists. And we're thinking like, this is
just exploding, right?
Worldwide. And being in touch
with all these people now, now I'm
starting to recognize all
sorts of people I know in the
industry. And I wouldn't call it small,
but it's a little bit intimate
right now. And I think people
are very conscious about losing that
family feel of it all because
we're all going down the same
path. So it's very exciting and it's
very, very new. We'll see
where it all goes. And then the
most exciting news I think is that after
this group and after
coming back from Amsterdam and
realizing we've got a strong-knit,
talented group in Toronto, a few of us
from Toronto were hired
as AI artists to work on a documentary
series or broadcast, you
could say, and streaming. I can't
talk about the specifics of the project,
but what was really
interesting is that this new startup
company in Los Angeles, founded by four
people who had been in the
industry for quite a while,
but they were early adopters of AI,
started this nice company and they're
nice people. And one of
them happens to be from Toronto
originally that develops AI
recreations for lower budget
documentary series. So that, again, back
to your point, the
democratization, it allows people to
have a fighting chance, you will, against
higher end special effects
and bigger budgets. So we're
all kind of now working through the
process, the technology, us
as individual artists that are
learning a lot, changing what we knew,
and we're still in the
middle of it and we'll see where
it all goes. But the money is actually
good. It's on par, if not a little bit
more than what I make
at my professional job in broadcasting.
So that's where I'm at. It
just has been like a whirlwind
experience. And I know I'm talking again
a lot, like the first part,
but I just, I can't believe
how fast everything is moving. And look,
there are haters out there
and naysayers, fine. I get it.
And I completely believe. Hold on a
second. You, in a first conversation,
even though you're excited
to personally work on an AI project, you
had very negative ideas
about where AI is headed in
general. Has that changed? No, I listen
to the podcast and I still
believe that I don't think
it's going to end up well. It's just my
gut feeling. But it's
happening whether you're wanted
or not, so you might as well get on
board. Well, if you're
interested in it, sure. I mean,
I don't think traditional storytelling
will go away. One of the
things we learned with this
series is you can't really do a push
button technology yet. We
spend a lot of times pulling
out our hair, trying to figure out how to
do something. There are
simple functions that it
does well and there are simple functions
it doesn't do well. However, I got a
glimpse and developing
an episode that I worked on myself, I got
a glimpse that yes, this
will work and it does work.
One of the things as you were talking
that I was reminded of
is back in the 90s when
young kids, I think they were getting
plucked out of high
school. If you had any kind of
played video games on computers, tech
companies were plucking you out of
everywhere and paying
you huge salaries to start working on dot
coms. It's really exciting
that this thing that started
as a way for you to get back to being
creative and just kind of
have some fun and then having
a little success and getting to go to
this place. From there, the networking
and the opportunities
and the ideas and now it's just turned
into this full-blown new career.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I look
back on it the other day and I thought
in exactly my path has been what you
described. I pretty much out
of college film school, I got
into video game production as the media
guy, the video guy, the
media guy, the storytelling part
with my friend who is a writer who is
still a collaborator of
mine on films after all these
years since we started in high school.
That was our first kind of
real salary job was video games
in the 90s. Say I was 25 then and I'm in
my 50s now, like 25, 30
years later, I'm going back full
circle and experience the same kind of
excitement and evolution, if
you will, of this kind of image
making technology. What I kind of stopped
and asked myself as a little
bit of an aside joke is like,
would you prefer to be making films the
way you made them say in
the Super 8 days when you're
free and it was fun in high school? Would
you prefer to be making
the kind of technology you
did in the video game days? Would you
prefer to be making
films the way you made them,
the traditional documentaries? And you
know what the answer was? I
only choose what I'm doing now.
I would rather do what I'm doing now with
this new technology than
any of those other things.
And that's the honest answer. That is the
best answer. You asked
that question in the first
episode, like, can you stay creative as
we age? Can you have this
second win? Can you restart
again? And since then, I've been thinking
about it myself because in
a sense, that's what I did.
Like I've been an artist for a very long
time, but it's only very
recently that I made this kind of
leap to turn that into a business and a
career and to like actually,
you know, I'm more creative
now and I'm doing more painting now and
more projects and more
opportunities and exhibitions
than ever before. And you've always
embraced the latest
technologies when it served you. And
I always remember that. So it just goes
hand in hand, I suppose.
I mean, I think there's something there
that it would take me a
while to kind of articulate,
but has to do with just being on that,
you know, staying in
that flow of like where
technology is going, where your chosen
industry is going, where
just sort of like humanity
collectively, where we're going in that
kind of creative space. And when you do,
you find that opportunities are there and
it feels right. It feels like
you're in the right place at
the right time and can't think of a
better place to be. Right.
That's exactly where I'm at. And it's
just maybe a bit of dumb luck. I feel
very fortunate. And on
the AI front, I get to experience the
evolution of this type of
filmmaking. And fortunate enough
that my first professional job was
actually in documentary and making
recreations for a cool
documentary series with AI recreations.
Because I remember I asked,
like I had that as a question.
I was like, I can see it being used for
advertising and
special effects in movies,
but how can you use it in documentaries?
And you said that there
are, yes, like recreations,
and indeed there here you are doing that.
And it feels like a full circle for you.
And that's pretty awesome. It's crazy
because on a personal level,
I've always been afraid of change and I
don't like change and I
don't like getting older.
But there's nothing you can do about
those things. So I'm fortunate that I
have these things in front
of me and look at, put it this way,
what's kind of funny about say the AI
world is that as you
get older, I wouldn't even be able to, at
my age now, to deal with
standing on my feet 12 hours a
day on set filming something or doing
five setups or three setups
or even two setups a day and
traveling around the city filming even
with a small crew like we
did in New York. I wouldn't
be able to physically do that. I need my
sleep. You get the best of both worlds.
I think it's really encouraging that
you're saying that suddenly there's all
these jobs opening up
for AI artists. And that's really
encouraging for me to hear because if
anybody can, if anyone
can just press a button and create
something of the same quality, then there
wouldn't be need for
artists to be hired to do that, which
tells me that AI art is
starting to reach a level where
being an artist, having creativity and
vision and expertise and
applying that expertise,
like learning about this new technology
is actually now an
emerging field. So in that,
I think when we talk about like, is AI
going to replace everything
we do? No, because you still
need people who can collaborate with it,
give it the right
information and have sort of the
ability to discern what is good, what
isn't, take it in a different
direction. Some of the skills
are new, but on a metal level, it's still
skills. And I find that highly
optimistic. I don't see
myself going into AI art because I really
enjoy the physicality of
painting, but I've been
playing around with how AI can help me
generate ideas. I've been
inspired lately to kind of like
step out of my comfort zone and see where
it goes. And I was sort
of like interested in how
AI can help me do that. Like the artistic
part of it is still going to be me, but
it's a tool that is helping immensely get
it started. And I'm
really optimistic. I feel even
more optimistic about where things are
going with AI after talking
to you about this. And that's,
I love that. Well, I'll finish with two
things. You're absolutely
right again, is that as a
creative, you don't necessarily have to
be creative to use it. And
I think that's absolutely
liberating for everyone. On the other
hand, it depends where you
want to take it. You're into
whatever genre go with it. But I also
think you're right is that eventually
this technology is going
to be just simple and push button that
anybody can do it and get the same
results. So what's left is
the creative person with some kind of
originality. So that's not going to go
away. That's going to
become more important. And right now, I
also find that people who have
traditional media experience
are some of the better artists out there
and the more efficient. This has been an
amazing conversation
and I'm so excited for all the things
that are happening in your
life. And just even listening
to that, it gives me a lot of hope for
what the future holds with that
technology, but also just
this idea that it's never too late to
reinvent yourself. It's
never too late to embrace change
and embrace new opportunities. And I
guess it's kind of funny that I don't
know if I would say I
feel vindicated, but when people ask me,
so this is all cool, but so
what? It's like, well, there's
actually money to be made and there's
things to do with it in any genre. And
then finally, what I
like about it personally is that because
my whole life has been linked to
technology and creativity,
is that I get to be part of what I do
professionally, which is
help develop new workflows,
help develop new ways of production
methods, new ways of using
technology to basically evolve
image-making. And that's kind of what
it's all about for me. And if
I get paid, great. If I don't,
well, I would still play around with the
technology just to be on
top of it. And so I'm very,
very satisfied. And yes, it has been a
whirlwind since we last
spoke. And I'm glad that you gave
me this opportunity to bring you up to
speed. And hopefully I can
have something more to report in
another few months or whenever we have
time to do this again. Thank
you so much for coming back on
the show and for bringing us all up to
speed with all the exciting stuff
happening in the world of
AI. Yeah, thank you. I love the program.
It's great. Thank you.