Two decades inside the machine.
For two decades I was inside the machine — managing partner at a digital agency in Atlanta, building content systems and production infrastructure for brands that needed to stay current in a medium that never stopped changing.
What I built in those years wasn't just campaigns and content. It was judgment. About what works, what doesn't, why most digital projects fail, and how to structure the ones that don't.
The work wasn't glamorous in the way agency portfolios tend to make it look. It was translating between languages — client language, design language, production language, business language — and finding the logic underneath all of it that could actually ship.
That combination was the job, even when the job didn't have a name for it yet.
The tools crossed a threshold. I was paying attention.
In 2023 something changed. Not for everyone at once — just quietly, for anyone paying close enough attention. AI video went from a novelty to a genuine production medium in about eighteen months, and the question stopped being can it work and started being who knows how to work it.
I started building. Not experimenting — building. Studying the tools the way I'd once studied craft: what each model excels at, where the seams show, how to write to a generator the way a director talks to a cinematographer. Prompt architecture as creative direction. AI tool stacks as production infrastructure.
The short film Riviera Breakup came out of that period — a French New Wave pastiche assembled entirely through AI generation, edited with the same editorial sensibility I'd spent twenty years developing. It was proof that the medium was real. The question was what to do with it.
The craft and the strategy. The tool and the outcome.
I direct video and motion for brands, and I build the AI-native workflows that make that production possible. Sometimes that's a single deliverable. Sometimes it's a longer engagement — concept through delivery, working inside a team that needs senior creative depth without the overhead of a full-time hire.
The common thread is always the same: the work requires someone who understands both sides. The craft and the strategy. The tool and the outcome. The frame and what goes inside it.
Twenty years of agency production and three years building AI-native workflows from scratch — that's what made both lanes possible. Not as separate capabilities. As the same one.