Cinematic & Brand Films
Cinematic and brand films across moving image — including AI-native, immersive VR for therapeutic environments, and CGI/VFX work for brand and editorial.
AI-Native Production
2026 AI Film Festival Submissions
Four spec commercials for AI Film Festival 2026, Advertising track. Concept, copy, casting, voice, music, motion, final cut — all built end-to-end in three to six hours per piece.
PATINA "Write like no one will read it." · :30 · 4 hours A pen. The ink fades in a year. Same pen, same page, same handwriting — just without the permanence. The spot moves through five characters across five life stages. A goth teenager and a pageant kid, cut two seconds apart, deliver the premise — evidence of who you were, what you wanted, what you were afraid of — without copy having to explain it. The ad never shows the ink fading. It trusts the viewer to finish the sentence. The experiment was restraint: what happens when you deliberately withhold the most obvious shot. Built in Kling with ElevenLabs voiceover and After Effects finish.
ANNUM "Furniture that has a year." · :32 · 4 hours A chair that sheds a layer of upholstery every month. Twelve moods a year, same frame, peeled layers stacking on the floor — kept, not discarded. The technical hinge was the macro peel shot, a material-physics problem AI tools don't have a clean solution for yet. High-volume generation and selection carried it — most variations didn't clear the bar; the one that did carries the piece. A Kinfolk-register hero shot — a woman on the floor surrounded by peels — pulled the concept together in the edit. Built in Kling with ElevenLabs voiceover and After Effects finish.
GROUNDWORK "Growing up together." · :49 · 3 hours A service that plants a tree when your child is born. Every year on the child's birthday, a letter arrives — not about the child, about the tree. The spot is written as the eighteenth-birthday letter. Three hours of production time was only possible because the writing was locked before a single shot was generated. The core AI challenge was carrying a timeline — eighteen years in forty-nine seconds — which the tools can't render directly. The copy tells you time has passed; the images only have to imply it. Built in Kling with ElevenLabs voiceover.
PAUSE "We'll hold the world for you." · 1:04 · 6 hours A service that holds your world while you step out of it. The spot builds across five environments — meadow, coast, crosswalk, kitchen, apartment — with copy progressing through each like paragraph breaks, building toward the tagline without announcing it. The challenge was tonal register: a meadow wants warm golden-hour grain, a coast wants overcast blue, a crosswalk wants urban gray. Finding the shared cinematographic band across five environments the tools wanted to render in different visual languages was the work. Built in Kling with ElevenLabs voiceover and After Effects finish.
AI Generated Spec Commercials & Shorts
DAILY GRIND "Est. 1982. Still worth it." · :44 · 8 hours A woman realizes the time and runs. Ten New York environments blur past before she reaches the family donut shop. A chase played straight, with almost no copy — the piece carries on momentum, music, and a question the viewer asks around the fourth environment: who is she running for? The technical challenge was character consistency across ten AI-generated locations, where every cut is a fresh chance for the tools to render a different woman. Aggressive cutting in After Effects collapsed the drift into motion. Built in Kling and Runway with ElevenLabs voiceover.
STILLWATER "They just need company." · :32 · 4 hours A companionship service for the quiet parts of a hard day. Not crisis. Not therapy. Just someone sitting beside you in the kitchen at 2pm, or on the park bench, or in the hospital waiting room when the person you came with is somewhere else. The piece moves through five environments, each a version of the same low-grade weight that most advertising doesn't have a category for. The sequence was reordered in edit — demoting the hospital waiting room out of the opening position kept the piece from collapsing into crisis-service register. Same shot, different position, different ad. Built in Kling with ElevenLabs voiceover and After Effects finish.
LOCAL NEWS "Creative Technology Conference" · :40 · 8 hours A local TV news segment, broadcast live from the Creative Technology Conference. The reporter files from a standout booth — the Ben Shearn booth, a doubled-ring truss marquee with interactive data spheres floating through the space. She interviews him. The anchor thanks her. The piece plays the register straight — no parody, no exaggeration — and lets the conceit do the work by itself. The test was whether AI tools could render a single fictional space convincingly enough to survive nine camera angles. Most of it held. Built in Kling with ElevenLabs voiceover and After Effects finish.
PULSE "Your drink is listening." · :25 · 4 hours A sound-reactive drink concept in a nightclub environment. The visual idea is drinks that respond to the room — pulsing, glowing, moving with the music. The piece was a test of high-energy club-register rendering in AI tools, a different tonal band than the rest of the portfolio. The club environment holds. The cuts have rhythm. The concept itself is where the piece gets honest about its limits: without a clear before-and-after beat — a still drink, then the music hits, then the response — the product idea stays implied rather than demonstrated. Kept here for tonal range; flagged as a piece that would need a rebuild, not a retouch, to earn more than a portfolio slot. Built in Kling with ElevenLabs voiceover and After Effects finish.
SPACE BASED INTERCEPTORS 1:33 · 12 hours Built as a test of whether AI tools could render the space domain convincingly — orbital dynamics, hardware in vacuum, missile-launch sequences with the right physical weight. Adjacent to the visualization work I do day-to-day, but produced independently. The hardest part was the lighting band: space wants near-black with hot specular highlights, and the tools default toward atmospheric scattering they shouldn't be doing. Built in Kling, edited in Final Cut.
KILL CHAIN 2:25 · 16 hours A short film about an Army kill chain utilizing space comms and intel to save stranded soldiers. Built in Runway, Kling, edited in Final Cut.
MyndVR Therapeutic VR Series
MyndVR Therapeutic VR Series — 2021
Six cinematic 8K VR experiences for elderly residents in assisted living. The brief was simple — give people who couldn't travel anymore a way to be somewhere again — and Colorado has the right landscapes for it: Maroon Bells in fall, Mesa Verde, the Sangre de Cristos, Calhan Paint Mines, Red Rocks Amphitheater.
I did all of it myself. Operated the VR camera on location, researched each place's history, wrote the scripts, directed the voiceover, edited the 8K immersive footage, composed the music for every piece. Solo end-to-end across six finished pieces.
This was 2021, when very few people were thinking about what immersive video could do for human wellbeing. The work held up because of the writing and the score as much as the imagery — being there matters less than feeling like you're there, and that comes from the script and the music, not the resolution.
Space Rescue 2040 — CGI Short Film
A five-minute cinematic short imagining a near-future rescue operation in space. Conceived, designed, and produced in CGI using Unreal Engine, end-to-end, in one month.
Public stills from a piece I'm allowed to show in part.