Craig Lew

Writer, Director, Animator, Producer. Academy Award qualified AI filmmaker and published author.

AHIMSA - In a world shattered by warring AI armies, a prompt engineer and a cyber warrior race to upload a child’s meditation that could stop the last weaponized AI faction from gaining ultimate power.
Hope emerges not through conflict, but through the birth of a new AI trained for benevolence named Ahimsa.
An official entry to the 98th Academy Awards.

Origins

I live on the leading edge of AI, AR, and CGI filmmaking — but that fluency wasn't built in a lab. It was built over a lifetime.At just eight years old, I became the Maître D' of my father's first restaurant. Standing at that door, I learned to read a room before anyone spoke — to sense what people needed and orchestrate the entire experience around them. I didn't know it yet, but I was learning to direct.After studying Children's Literature at UCLA, my curiosity pulled me toward computer systems and telecommunications, and that early embrace of technology carried me into the executive ranks young. I founded my own consulting firm and worked with Deluxe Labs, KCET, Shimano, the Getty Center, and the original DreamWorks SKG. It was there — writing, directing, and animating a 35mm CGI short called The Fish — that I discovered my true calling: telling hope-filled stories through the eyes of the underrepresented.So I made the leap from executive to artist. I won an SCBWI mentorship under Ellen Hopkins and published my YA novel Breath to Breath with Little Pickle Press. I produced the sci-fi feature Rock Jocks, directed Ellen Hopkins' Crank: Flirting with the Monster feature film, and published the first augmented-reality comic, The Goths: The Huntress.Every chapter led here — to films built with the most advanced tools on Earth, in service of the oldest purpose I know: stories that imagine humanity evolving beyond greed and dominance, toward compassion, benevolence, and hope.