Big Work, Small Teams: The Future of Entertainment, Film, and Interactive Experiences

AI is moving fast across every industry, and entertainment, real-time games and immersive experiences are right in the middle of it. Studio-level work is landing in the hands of small teams and solopreneurs — three of whom you'll meet here. The VFX shot, with Matthew Bell. A shot that once passed through a hundred hands can now be finished by one. Matthew spent 28 years lighting feature films — Iron Man 3, Star Trek, Ready Player One — and now builds agent-driven production pipelines where AI agents operate Houdini, Maya, Blender, Unreal and Nuke directly. The game built solo, with Derek Alexander. Derek presents Educade, a curriculum-aligned gaming platform for K–8, and how AI is reshaping how games are designed, supported, published and played — including rapid generation of new games by developers, and maybe by players. The exhibit that answers back, with Joe Guerra. A space-museum exhibit where a visitor asks a robot a question and a 3D model of the answer appears in a volumetric display. Joe built it alone in a few weeks. He'll show what that AI workflow costs, where it broke, and the rule that kept it safe in public: the AI picks the words, but a person picks everything the visitor sees. Three rapid-fire presentations, then a Q&A panel with all three presenters.