I help creative organizations direct AI instead of drowning in it. Universities, studios and creative teams bring me in to train their people, build the curriculum, and design the production systems that keep people making the decisions.
Five tensions I keep seeing. Neither side wins, and most organizations are stuck somewhere in the middle.
Technical skill is getting cheap. Taste is getting scarce. But you still learn taste by making things.
What to doBuild your taste on purpose: what you watch, what you seek out, what you argue about at parties. Lean into your weird. Mid is easy now.
Owning your IP still matters. But being known as the person who made it often matters more.
What to doProtect what matters most. Share the rest. Show your work often and talk about it.
Small teams can now do what used to take big ones. Vision and direction matter more than hours.
What to doFind a workflow and automate the heck out of it. But know what you’re making first.
Once you make something digital, you can reuse it. A film becomes a game, a game becomes a lesson.
What to doStop making one-offs. Start building worlds.
Your consumers are your new collaborators. They talk back and make their own stuff.
What to doBring your community into what you’re building.
The product is not proof.
If a machine can make it, the finished thing doesn’t prove anyone learned anything. So what does? That’s the question under all my work.
I direct Media Entrepreneurship and Innovation and teach across the business and arts colleges: business to creatives, creativity to business people. I developed the early concept and technology vision for what became CMII and wrote the core curriculum for its Media Entrepreneurship program.
I built an agentic scripting system for StudioNow inside Coca-Cola, developed AI production methods, and trained producers to work with generative tools.
One day. People develop, direct and screen their own short films made with generative tools. I’ve run ten of them for industry professionals. People get AI fastest by making something and watching it together.
“Astonishing. Like it or not, AI is here, and it is something every filmmaker needs to understand.”
Tom Luse, Executive Producer, The Walking Dead
I co-teach the AI and creativity module in the 2026 Founderz × Microsoft AI and Innovation certificate: imagination, creative direction, and how to make work that isn’t average.
I direct programming for the Alliance: monthly gatherings on making and teaching immersive work. I also founded the Immersive Impact Review, the peer-reviewed journal we built together.
A chapter on creative intention, judgment and expertise when people make things with AI. For an Edward Elgar book on teaching in the age of AI, edited by Michael A. Peters and J. Owen Matson.
Keynotes, workshops and executive sessions.
When how gets cheap, why is the only expensive thing left. What the hard parts of work, learning and institutions were for, which ones to keep, and what to build instead. First given at the Atlanta Regional Commission, October 2026.
The five tensions, live. What’s changing in creative work, authorship, production and business models, and what to do about each.
What counts as proof of learning, skill and authorship when the finished work can be generated. For educators and anyone who hires.
Faculty workshops, AI curriculum, assessment that still works when students have AI.
Generative Storytelling Labs, pipeline design, crew training.
Agentic production systems, producer training, creative strategy.
The questions under all of it. I have working answers to some, and I’m writing them down.
What gets scarce when making things is nearly free?
What happens to expertise when a machine can copy everything it makes?
Who owns the systems, who gets paid, and who ends up with the power?
Who am I talking to inside my own head, and does that change when the machine talks back?
I helped build internet infrastructure at Georgia State, then joined Mindspring as one of its first forty employees, in the early days of the commercial internet. Since then I’ve followed the frontier: cinema, immersive media, blockchain, AI.
I was early to NFTs and early to the metaverse, and both went south. The problems they were chasing didn’t: who owns digital work, who gets paid for it, and how we live in worlds that aren’t physical. I still care about those problems. I’m less attached to any one technology.
I studied philosophy, computer science and filmmaking, in that order, and I use all three every week. I’d rather run an experiment than make a prediction.
Send the context, the audience, the timing, and what would help. I’ll tell you straight if I’m the right person.
