For over a decade my focus has been emerging media. The forms keep changing; what interests me doesn't: what a new medium lets an artist do, and what it lets an audience feel. Experiences that transport, emotionally and physically. Stories that couldn't have existed before — built with the ambition of standing beside the real thing as its equal.
Emerging media is the pre-grammar phase of a medium. It earns its existence two ways: it amplifies a story that already exists, or it gives a new one the ability to exist at all. Both happen by closing the distance between audience and idea. Real enough a phase that the Television Academy built a peer group around it — Emerging Media Programming, where I hold membership.
Today that means leading immersive storytelling for Apple on Vision Pro: defining the language of a new medium at the highest fidelity yet, across music, sport, scripted, unscripted, and documentary, including the Emmy-nominated Metallica film.
Metallica is the first kind. People have tried to capture live music for a century; we captured the final show of a two-year run, and the film did what no concert film had — made the band feel larger than life, godlike, then suddenly singular, with an intimacy that shouldn't have been possible for the most documented band alive.
Madefire was the second kind, a studio built to give new stories a way to exist. The stories were agnostic to the medium — played beautifully flat, reached new heights in immersive — and the authoring tools were open to creators so they could tell their own. That's why we called Madefire a story factory.
When Magic Leap launched, we came out of stealth: our titles and the tools that published them shipped with the headset.
The work followed as original worlds unfolding across mediums, cinematic films where the audience was the driving force. Our original, Mono Blackwater, premiered at SXSW. We brought Marvel's Black Panther into a new dimension, took Paramount's USS Enterprise on new voyages, and built out the Planet of the Apes for Fox — motion books for all reality.
The lesson was clear: collapse engineering and concept into a single vocabulary from the start. Participate, build and understand the mechanics so the technology and the idea arrive together, and each first is less fragile for it.
The job is the same in a headset as on a page, a screen, a stage: close the distance.
And now, what couldn't exist before, can. What was too expensive, isn't. What took too long, doesn't. I suspect the magic will materialize where there's collective desire to use these new tools to generate the new and the original, with the depth of something felt.
That's the work I lead.
Apple — Immersive Creative Director
Madefire —Creative Director
Moving Brands — Creative Director, Special Projects & West Coat Lead
Oculus — Creative Director
Television Academy — Emerging Media Peer Group
For over a decade my focus has been emerging media. The forms keep changing; what interests me doesn’t: what a new medium lets an artist do, and what it lets an audience feel. Experiences that transport, emotionally and physically. Stories that couldn’t have existed before — built with the ambition of standing beside the real thing as its equal.
Emerging media is the pre-grammar phase of a medium. It earns its existence two ways: it amplifies a story that already exists, or it gives a new one the ability to exist at all. Both happen by closing the distance between audience and idea. Real enough a phase that the Television Academy built a peer group around it — Emerging Media Programming, where I hold membership.
Today that means leading immersive storytelling for Apple on Vision Pro: defining the language of a new medium at the highest fidelity yet, across music, sport, scripted, unscripted, and documentary, including the Emmy-nominated Metallica film.
Metallica is the first kind. People have tried to capture live music for a century; we captured the final show of a two-year run, and the film did what no concert film had — made the band feel larger than life, godlike, then suddenly singular, with an intimacy that shouldn’t have been possible for the most documented band alive.
Madefire was the second kind, a studio built to give new stories a way to exist. The stories were agnostic to the medium — played beautifully flat, reached new heights in immersive — and the authoring tools were open to creators so they could tell their own. That’s why we called Madefire a story factory.
When Magic Leap launched, we came out of stealth: our titles and the tools that published them shipped with the headset.
The work followed as original worlds unfolding across mediums, cinematic films where the audience was the driving force. Our original, Mono Blackwater, premiered at SXSW. We brought Marvel’s Black Panther into a new dimension, took Paramount’s USS Enterprise on new voyages, and built out the Planet of the Apes for Fox — motion books for all reality.
The lesson was clear: collapse engineering and concept into a single vocabulary from the start. Participate, build and understand the mechanics so the technology and the idea arrive together, and each first is less fragile for it.
The job is the same in a headset as on a page, a screen, a stage: close the distance.
And now, what couldn’t exist before, can. What was too expensive, isn’t. What took too long, doesn’t. I suspect the magic will materialize where there’s collective desire to use these new tools to generate the new and the original, with the depth of something felt.
That’s the work I lead.