I’ve got to start this fifteenth entry with a bit of an apology, mostly to myself, for letting this experiment pause for longer than I’d intended. My goal was to publish something at least once a month, but with the natural ebbs and flows of freelance production life, that goal has slipped away from me a bit. That said, things are flowing right now.
After a pretty slow (read: abysmal) summer, fall has been packed with one exciting project and opportunity after another. Most weeks lately have included one or two days on set, a couple more spent editing, managing projects, and handling admin work, and the rest of my time, usually early mornings or late evenings, dedicated to making photos for my MFA program. My caffeine intake is definitely high at the moment, but I’ll never turn down a good cup of coffee.
Which is a nice transition to mentioning that I’ve also been more proactive than ever about taking meetings to meet and speak with folks about potentially collaborating. People with expertise completely unrelated to my own, in various fields, that could end up making for some interesting collaborations and partners down the road.
Building my first brand
This fall has also been an interesting time for me because, while all this production work has been happening, I’ve also been quietly building my first brand. For the first time, I’m the client, and it’s been a great way to get grounded in a client’s way of thinking as I approach this new venture. It’s not an experience we often get as freelance film and photography folks who are usually tasked only with translating a brand’s messaging into a storytelling, visually driven format. It’s been a humbling dose of reality to be the stakeholder of a brand in a holistic sense, rather than just the person helping to share its message.
So far in this process, I’ve had the chance to collaborate with close friends who work in brand design, web design, trademarking, editing, animation, and even heads of agencies. In about a week, I’ll have a finalized logo, a brand bible with approved color ways, and many of the essentials needed to move this vision forward in a clean, concise, and dope way. I’ve gotten so much value from conversations with people who have spent decades building and maintaining successful brands. It’s been a real education, and while I’m going to keep things annoyingly ambiguous for now, I’m beyond excited to share everything once the time feels right. I might even consider opening up parts of the building process along the way. But for now, it’s build, build, build.
New Website
About a month ago, my new portfolio website went live. Earlier this year, I did a bunch of research and found a web designer whose work and approach I was really drawn to. His name is Nicolas Leuliet, and he runs the design firm NSLT Studio. I first reached out to Nicolas in February 2025, paused on the redesign for a bit, and then decided to move forward in May with an August start date.
At the beginning of August, Nicolas and I dove into discussions and started sharing site references. It was vitally important to me that the site have as few barriers as possible to viewing the work—both motion and stills. In the past, the main note I’d received from EPs and reps was that there were too many clicks before getting to the actual work. Now, every piece of motion in the portfolio is just one click away from the homepage. The stills page behaves like a light-box, where all of the images live on an overview grid, and only when you click on one does it loupe and zoom in for a closer look.
Nicolas and NSLT nailed the design, nailed the flow, and went above and beyond to make sure every note I had was addressed before we called it finished. It was another instance of me being the client, and one that was both eye-opening and refining.
It’s all coming together
This redesign felt like a natural extension of everything else I’ve been building lately, whether it’s refining my existing personal brand, developing a new one altogether, nurturing collaborations, or shaping how I present my work to the world. The site isn’t just a portfolio; it’s a reflection of where I am creatively right now, and the kind of work I want to keep doing and putting out into the world. It’s simple, direct, and intentional, which is how I’m trying to approach everything these days, at least commercially.
When it comes to an artistic practice, which feels completely separate from my commercial work, I’m still trying to embrace things being a bit more messy and lived in. I remember a professor of mine looking at an image I made and, after pausing for a moment, saying, “I wish you’d fucked it up a little.” So artistically, that’s what I’m trying to do—fuck things up a bit more, embrace the imperfections, and let the messiness breathe.
This year has exceeded expectations in some ways and fallen short in others, but one thing that’s become crystal clear is the separation between my commercial practice and my artistic practice. That line has been sharpened for good. There will always be some overlap in how I approach commercials artistically, but it’s a very different mindset from how I approach work as an artist. In commercial work, the product is the hero—everything orbits around it. In art, the questions are the hero, and there’s no need for resolution. Maybe that’s the real difference between being the client and being the contractor: one is in search of answers, and the other is in search of meaning.
See y’all soon!
So excited to see what you're building!