The Work
Two minutes, then five things worth your time.
Two minutes, then five things worth your time.
Showreel
Two minutes. If you only have two minutes, spend them here.
Selected — swipe
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Backwards
How a director gets made when nobody starts there.
I learned directing backwards.
Most directors start by calling themselves one. I got there last — through the stills, the layouts, the lens, the edit, the mix, the schedule, and several hundred pages of script and pitch deck. Which means I know what every person on set is actually dealing with, because I have been most of them.
- 08 Director Where it ended up.
- 07 Writing & Concept Scripts, and the decks that get them approved. An idea nobody can picture does not get made.
- 06 Producer Schedules, budgets, and the word no.
- 05 Sound Half the picture, and the half people notice last.
- 04 Editing Where I learned that coverage is a promise you make on set.
- 03 Cinematography Enough to ask for the right thing, not enough to do it better than my DP.
- 02 Design Composition, type, and why some frames feel expensive.
- 01 Photography The first one. Still the one I fall back on.
Read it bottom to top. That is the order it happened in.
Territory
Three places, and a habit of leaving them.
Beirut
Studied business because it was sensible, then film because it was not. Kept both.
Montreal
Porsche, Audi, ScotiaBank. Two years producing for Airbnb, and one villa in Panama that nearly killed me in ten separate ways.
The GCC
Where the productions got serious. National campaigns, World Cups, and clients who say yes to difficult things.
Available anywhere there is a production. Historically, that has been eleven countries and counting.
The Rooms
What it is actually like, and what it adds up to.
The clock starts when they walk in.
Most of them have been on more sets than I have. They usually arrive with less time than the schedule promised, and a commercial set runs nothing like a film set, so even actors are working in a rhythm they do not know.
Both ends of that range won awards. That is the part I am actually proud of.
- 6 Gold MUSE
- 1 Platinum MUSE
- 1 Grand NYX
- 1 Grand LIT
How I Work
Six things that turned out to be true, and the work beyond films.
- Good ideas usually get simpler, not bigger.
- Production problems are creative problems until proven otherwise.
- If the audience can feel the strategy, the strategy failed.
- AI is a very fast assistant. Taste is still our problem.
- The budget is a creative challenge, not an apology.
- If it is not fun, it is not worth it.
And when the problem is not a film.
A fair amount of what I do never reaches a camera. I get brought in to shape the idea, to make the case for it, and to fix how creative work gets made in the first place — because production is an operations problem wearing a creative hat, and most creative businesses are losing money somewhere they cannot see.
- Creative strategy The idea, the argument for it, and the deck that gets it approved before anyone commits a budget — plus the marketing strategy around it, design and film together rather than one commissioned after the other and hoping they match. An idea nobody can picture does not get made.
- Systems & workflow How work moves from brief to delivery without three people rebuilding the process each time.
- Team & operations Structuring creative departments so they scale without losing whatever made them good.
- AI in production As a process, and when it earns its place, as the final output. I use it daily and I am opinionated about where it stops.