Such a small world.

The bus that took me from New York to West Reading, PA had two other filmmakers: Vanessa and Kathleen, the co-creators of the wonderful “Five Flights.” We chatted a bit before boarding the bus and then shared an Uber to Marriott’s. (Reading Film Festival provided two free nights to every filmmaker, woot!)

Our names were on the VIP guest list, so the check-in took literally seconds. The organizers gave me a bag of festival swag, two filmmaker badges (alas, I had no companion… but that meant double the drink tickets!), and an XXL-sized T-shirt due to the L-size mix-up. If I ever get a gf who likes wearing oversized shirts as pajamas, this will work great, eh.

After stashing my loot in my posh suite, I joined the first of the three separate filmmaker happy hours that night. In between, there was a 2-hour film block, but I can’t recall what was in it for the life of me.

And so it went the entire weekend: fun films all day long, all the beer and wine we could possibly ask for, and delicious food. By my guesstimate, there were about 40 visiting filmmakers (the local ones didn’t get the free hotel suites), and many new friendships were forged.

I showed off my very first film, “Please Don’t Send Help,” to quite a lot of applause and a fun Q&A with the audience and the event’s host. Along the way, I talked about my technique (making films solely with public domain footage) and trash-talked AI (which was really too easy).

The film block just before mine was “Animation and AI.” Three real animated films, three that were AI garbage. The sole filmmaker from that block who attended the event gave a brave, passionate speech: he’d spent months of his life creating and perfecting his short film, and it was slotted with that slop… The audience gave him one helluva ovation. One audience member actually asked the host to clarify which of the six films were AI slop.

That was a recurring theme throughout the weekend. Lately, AI cultists have been either bribing film festivals to accept their slop or downright spamming their submissions with infinite pieces of AI-generated videos. Each film festival that surrenders and accepts AI adds a bit more legitimacy to those dishonourable thieves. We’ve recently lost Telluride…

As far as I can tell, the Reading fest has added that section for the very first time. (This was their 11th annual festival.) I don’t think they’d anticipated the amount of backlash and anti-AI sentiment they would get. I told the festival’s runner that it would’ve been great if all AI-made (or AI-assisted) films had had a little mark next to them in the program. (It doesn’t have to be a scarlet letter, but that’d be nice.) I’m curious to see if that will happen…

Along the way, during my 55-hour stay in that town, I took very quick trips to see an old firewatch tower, the pagoda built by an eccentric German, and a small but sturdy castle where we had our very last (and small) afterparty on Sunday.

I also took an early-morning walk through downtown: they have so many beautiful murals, so much random street art… There must be something in the water!

I didn’t win any awards (and honestly, wasn’t even expecting to), but on that Sunday morning, I found out that I won the second place in the “Best Comedy SciFi Short Film” category at Brooklyn SciFi Film Festival. My first-ever film festival win – I’m honoured beyond words, and will ride that high for a very long time. (Also, now I get to add “award-winning” to my artist bio – huzzah!)

That Sunday night, after all the goodbyes, and promises to visit one another, and cake, and beer, I stood at the same bus station I’d arrived at, awaiting the bus to Philadelphia for my red-eye flight to Colorado. While waiting there, I realized two things: the “made in Reading” part of the festival was rather enticing, and the area right around the dark bus stop was quite picturesque… That resulted in me jogging around the block (backpacks and all) and filming just about everything on my Android phone. Got about 3-4 minutes of footage out of it: I’ll see if I can transform that into a short urban fantasy film. (For added difficulty, it’d have to be edited entirely on my phone: my computers are in storage in Quebec.)

The bus ride to Philly went well, but I can’t say the same about my bizarre experience with the city’s transit system at 11pm… After the second train suffered an identity crisis mid-ride and dropped me off in a weird-looking neighbourhood, I finally called a taxi. The driver was over-the-top apologetic for the way his city welcomed me. Good guy. Tipped him well.

And then… A night – and not even that – spent at the airport. People – and I use the term loosely – who thought it was fine to play loud videos on their phones at 1:20am as we all waited for the ticket counters to open. A 5am Frontier flight to Denver by way of Orlando, as well as a reminder why I rarely fly Frontier. My backpack cost me $70 since it was a carry-on item. The woman next to me in line was moving, so she had five gigantic (and bright-pink) pieces of luggage. They charged her $900 to check all of that in. She almost started crying… But ultimately accepted their terms.

Such a strange little world.

And meanwhile, a plane was waiting to fly me far away, to the Colorado mountains…