BC + AI × TheUpgrade · with Peter Bittner
The AI Upgrade for Creative Professionals
Rebuild your creative workflow with AI — without losing your craft.
A six-week, cohort-based intensive for creative professionals who want to reinvent how they work — not in theory, but in practice. Run with Peter Bittner of TheUpgrade and BC + AI’s Kris Krüg, it takes everything you’ve learned in your craft and supercharges an AI layer on top of it. Eight cohorts and 200+ creative pros in, including alumni from Disney, Paramount Pictures, and National Geographic.
- Format
- 6-week cohort + coaching
- Delivery
- Live online
- Track record
- 8 cohorts · 200+ alumni
- Built for
- Working creative pros
8
cohorts run over two years
200+
creative professionals trained
6
weeks to rebuild your workflow
Cohorts
Upcoming and recent runs
Cohorts 1–8
Completed2024–2026
Live online
200+ creative professionals trained, including alumni from Disney, Paramount, and National Geographic.
Next cohort
Enrolling nowDates to be announced
Live online
Registration runs through TheUpgrade — join the BC + AI list to hear first.
Register ↗
Who it’s for
Built for the people making the calls
Filmmakers, animators, designers, writers, and marketers who are trying to reinvent themselves — rebuild their workflows, understand the tools, and stay ahead. No coding background required; come with your craft and your curiosity.
Filmmakers & animators
Exploring AI-native production, VFX, and new pipelines — building tools that didn’t exist a year ago.
Designers & writers
Reinventing their whole workflow with AI in the loop, from ideation to delivery, without losing taste.
Marketers & founders
Shipping faster and smarter with an AI layer on top of the craft they already have.
What you’ll leave with
Outcomes you can use the next day
- Rebuild your day-to-day workflow around an AI stack that fits how you actually create.
- Develop the hard skills — prompting, workflow automation, compositing, model training — and the taste to use them well.
- Train a model on your own creative DNA and make it part of your process.
- Join a network of creative professionals doing the same reinvention across BC and beyond.
Curriculum
What you’ll work through
Six weeks of hands-on, cohort-based work blending hard skills, soft skills, and your own domain expertise. You bring your craft; the course helps you wrap an AI layer around it.
The AI creative stack
Get fluent across the tools that matter: image, voice, video, research, and code — Midjourney, ElevenLabs, NotebookLM, Claude, Figma Make, ChatGPT, Notion, and more, in a workflow that fits your craft.
Hard skills
Prompting, workflow automation, API integration, compositing, and training models — the technical muscle that turns AI from a toy into production capacity.
Soft skills
Critical thinking, discernment, and taste. The part the tools can’t do for you — and the part that keeps your work yours.
Your creative DNA
Train a model on your own body of work, build repeatable workflows, and leave with a process you can keep evolving long after the cohort ends.
The capstone
You leave with a rebuilt workflow, a personal AI toolkit, and — for many graduates — work and tools that didn’t exist before: from AI-assisted VFX pipelines to live generative visuals.
Who’s teaching
Practitioners, not lecturers
Peter Bittner
Lead Instructor, TheUpgrade
Founder of TheUpgrade and lead instructor for the AI Upgrade. Has run eight six-week cohorts for creative professionals, training filmmakers, designers, and writers — including people from Disney, Paramount, and National Geographic — to rebuild their workflows with AI.
Kris Krüg
Co-host, BC + AI
Executive Director of BC + AI and a National Geographic photographer who trained a model on 2,000 of his own street portraits to understand his creative DNA. Brings the community and the “embrace the contradiction” perspective to the cohort.
Investment
Pricing — and why membership pays off
The AI Upgrade is run by TheUpgrade. Current pricing and dates live on theupgrade.ai.
Course
See theupgrade.ai
BC + AI community
20% off
Members & community
BC + AI members and community get a 20% discount. Join at /membership to plug into the 850+ member Discord, meetups, and every future certification discount.
Become a member first →FAQ
Questions, answered
Is this run by BC + AI?
The AI Upgrade is run by TheUpgrade with Peter Bittner, in partnership with BC + AI. Registration and current pricing live on theupgrade.ai; BC + AI members and community get a 20% discount.
Do I need to know how to code?
No. The course is built for creative professionals — filmmakers, designers, writers, marketers. You bring your craft; the course wraps an AI layer around it, including approachable automation and model training.
How is it different from the Animation Accelerator?
The Animation Accelerator is a focused, short intensive to direct one animated short. The AI Upgrade is a broader six-week reinvention of your whole creative workflow across tools, skills, and your own process.
When is the next cohort?
New cohorts are scheduled through TheUpgrade. Join the BC + AI events list (lu.ma/vancouver-ai) or check theupgrade.ai to be first to know when dates open.
Ready to join?
Next up: Next cohort · Dates to be announced.
Registration and current dates live with our program partner. Questions? Email [email protected] or come to Friday Office Hours (12–1 PM PT, free, open to all).