While the arguments about AI continue to swirl all around us, one Bangalow creative has used the technology to make a very humane animated film that will screen at this year’s Byron Bay Film Festival (BBFF).
Multimedia designer Nick George has a long background in animation and visualstorytelling, and he has always embraced and utilised new technologies as they emerge.
But the collaboration with AI to make Extra Time is a first, and the result is a heart-warming short film – a tale of a father and son bonding through sport. It is loosely based on the figure of Nick’s late grandfather, a keen rugby league and rugby union player.
“Pop coached my dad’s football team for a while and I know that talking about football was how they bonded,” Nick says. While the limited nature of such bonds might seem sad from one perspective, there’s also a kind of beauty in it, Nick says, and it’s something the film examines and celebrates.
Having twin boys of his own means Nick now finds himself frequently reflecting upon fatherhood and the men in his life, “trying to understand masculinity through that lens and through now being a dad”.
Pop was predeceased by his wife, and ageing and loneliness are also themes in the film, but Nick also sought to bring some lightness into it – “to find a bit of balance, to have some humour and some emotion”.
He and his wife, Annie, have been Bangalow residents for 10 or 11 years, but Nick grew up in Sydney and studied at Billy Blue College of Design in North Sydney.
He’s been a motion designer and animator for advertising agencies, on the TV show The Hungry Beast, made music videos and short ‘explainer’ films, and worked alongside his filmmaker brother in post-production. Extra Time is his first solo stand-alone film.
In the last two years, Nick has used AI increasingly and enjoys the extra capacity it provides to do more. He is also somewhat conflicted about its threats to jobs and creative freedom, but says “at the end of the day, it’s a new tool, and you have to adopt it to be at the front of the market”.
“It’s an interesting process understanding it and Extra Time was a good way to really sink in. The whole film was generated with AI but it was all at my direction. It was interesting to put in my ideas and try and work the AI to get the results I wanted. It’s not click and forget, there’s a lot of back and forth, a lot of massaging, and you hit a lot of walls.”
The process was very creative, he says: “You’re editing, art directing, designing, animating and rewriting.” He storyboarded each scene just as he would using a traditional approach.
“What the process gave me wasn’t the story,” he says. “That part was always mine. What it gave me was the ability to finally finish something I would have conceived either way, but never had the resources to complete before.
“It wasn’t simple. Getting a single shot right sometimes took 20 attempts. But every one of those attempts was in service of a story I cared about getting right, not just technically, but emotionally.”
He used Claude to help with the script, and the Higgsfield motion designer for the video work. It was a Higgsfield competition that made the film possible: through a global competition which gave him access to unlimited credits for a certain period.
Altogether he spent six weeks on the film, with plenty of late nights in his studio in Station Street.
The story of Extra Time is timeless, and the design aesthetic surprisingly old school – free of the hyper colour and slickness of much AI product.
“Basically, it’s a claymation style but I wanted it to still feel gritty and a bit rough, and unique. I was trying to avoid the generic sort of outputs that AI can create,” Nick says.
There’s a local feel to it that makes it right for the Byron Bay Film Festival: it features a slightly mystical magpie, a python, a rural, subtropical setting – and a humanity that won over BBFF director J’aimee Skippon-Volke.
The speed with which AI is disrupting almost every area of filmmaking has felt surreal, J’aimee says. “It has allowed filmmakers with no budget to create scenes they couldn’t afford in the past, and enabled many people to try their hand at animation. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should, and expensive-looking content doesn’t always equate to something that speaks to the people watching it.
“AI in the hands of someone like Nick George is an entirely different beast. He brings years of skill, experience and creative instinct to the technology, using AI to extend what he can already do, keeping his career relevant in a fast-changing world, and pushing his work in new directions.”
Nick says of the rapidly moving technology: “It’s so hard to know where everything’s going. It’s crazy. And as a creative, initially, it’s pretty scary. But then the flip side of that is it’s kind of exciting too.”
The experience has left him “pretty inspired” to try and create some more.
Extra Time is among scores of films screening at BBFF this month, many of them equally quirky and engaging, beginning with the Opening Night feature, The Fox, a darkly comic Australian folktale featuring the voices of Olivia Colman (as the Fox) and the late Sam Neill (as a very sweary magpie).
The film is “funny, beautifully made and unmistakably Australian”, says J’aimee, and has been hugely popular on the Australian festival circuit, winning the Audience Award for Best Australian Feature at the 2026 Sydney Film Festival.
The Fox felt like the right Opening Night choice, she says. “It’s strange, surprising and hugely enjoyable, while still having plenty going on beneath the surface. It’s also a distinctly Australian film with a really diverse cast. For our 20th edition, we wanted to start with something bold, wildly entertaining and made to be experienced with a crowd.
“Opening Night is always special, but there’s an added sense of celebration this year as we mark 20 editions of bringing filmmakers and audiences together,” says J’aimee, who for many of those years organised the festival from her crowded family home in Bangalow.
“The 20th edition feels like a milestone shared by everyone who has helped shape BBFF.”
Byron Bay International Film Festival October 16-25, various locations
bbff.com.au
Digby Hildreth