Paramount Creative & Strategy Sizzle

Roles: Producer + Editor

This is what we do at Paramount. The brand portfolio is massive, and it's our job to make it make sense. That means threading the needle between the fun and the grit, so that the newest show from the Yellowstone universe can be in the same room as the latest SpongeBob movie.

I've been the team's Senior Producer Editor for over five years now, and in that time we've done an absolutely absurd amount of work. I won't claim credit for other people's brilliance across everything that's in this sizzle, but I will claim credit for producing the sizzle itself.

Paramount Skydance Identity Film

Roles: Producer + Editor

I first worked with Paramount in 2016, back when it was simply Viacom. I say simply, because Viacom didn't have much of a brand identity. The brands it owned certainly did, and that was all Viacom needed, for MTV and BET and Nickelodeon to be recognizable destinations for their own types of content.

That all changed with streaming. Paramount surprised everyone by going all-in, not just creating its own platform to compete with the likes of Netflix and Disney, but even changing the name of the company so that every communication directly laddered up to Paramount+.

Five years later, and the company is changing once again, with new content and distribution priorities, but also a massive legacy library and vastly dispersed consumer base. So whether we're speaking to advertisers, industry leaders, or the average viewer, we need to show them that we have what they want, and that we're going where they're going.

Fun fact: I got to work with Wendell Pierce on this for the voiceover. Real ones know him as Bunk from The Wire.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Trailer Reveal

Roles: Director + Producer + Co-Editor + Additional VFX

Small project, but a big flex for me. Got to direct the last three Star Trek captains for this exclusive sneak-peak of what has since become the widely agreed upon favorite series from the modern era of the franchise.

When I say small project, what I really mean is that this was just one element of a much larger multi-million-dollar event announcing to the world that ViacomCBS was now Paramount. The budget for the event was huge, but with so many pieces of the pie to pay for, we had to figure out how to get our talent for this one captured with as little expense as possible.

Sir Patrick Stewart was actually on the set of Picard in a ready-to-go bluescreen setup, while Sonequa Martin-Green was willing to show up for a greenscreen shoot we were already doing for a completely different part of the event. Anson Mount had just had a baby and was hiding out in his decidedly remote home, but to his credit was willing to run out to a theater in the nearest town to record his part and was a pleasure to work with via Zoom from my apartment in Brooklyn.

As for everything else, we coordinated with different Star Trek production teams to get our hologram of Captain Janeway animated (for which Kate Mulgrew recorded her voice at a radio station that her husband worked in) as well as a 360° view of the transporter room to create all of the background plates to composite our actors into. Like I said, small but big!

Expedition Vegas: Journey To The Peak

Roles: Producer + Editor + Supervisor + Co-Writer

A top ten career highlight for sure. We basically put a theme park in the middle of Vegas for the Super Bowl and made a virtual friggin' rollercoaster for it.

Creatively, how do you craft a compelling narrative for a ski-lift trip up a mountain that also features the biggest Paramount IP? You can't just have a tiny RuPaul waving from a snow bank, you have to make things exciting, surprising, and worth sharing online. You have to you deliver something that people will be glad they waited in line to experience. In fact, you have to make waiting in line an experience too.

You also have to balance the creative with the technical considerations. Projections or LEDs? One large space for a crowd, or smaller spaces for multiple groups? How do you make sure there are no bad angles? Can subwoofers shake things up enough without having to bring in hydraulics?

Beyond the ride, we were also responsible for filling the entire activation with content screens, messaging, and a cohesive aesthetic that allowed for individual brand experiences to co-exist in a sprawling but easy to navigate space. And then we had to capture it all. If I wasn't shuttling footage to New York from my hotel room at the Mirage, I was on the ground pointing cameras at people enjoying what we had spent so many months building.

It's been about two years since we pulled it off, and I'm proud to say our work has continued into new markets. We've since partnered with international teams in Australia, Canada and Mexico to bring new versions of the ride to new audiences. Sky's the limit, it would seem. Pun intended.

Paramount Upfronts

Roles: Producer + Editor + Supervisor

It sounds like a platitude, but Paramount literally doesn't do Upfronts like any other media company. While Disney rents out the Javits Center to pile every ad agency together into a giant theater for a big song and dance (no disrespect, Paramount used to book Carnegie Hall to do the exact same thing) we've spent the last three years doing the opposite: over the course of two weeks, agencies are invited to an exclusive dinner and cocktail party in Chelsea to have one-on-one conversations with Paramount leadership and talent.

Our job, in partnership with our best friends at Events & Brand Experiences, is to make each year feel even more elevated than the last while seamlessly integrating all of the companies best claims, selling points and IP priorities into an immersive experience that doesn't feel talk down to an audience comprised entirely of storytellers.

For my part, I've had to do everything from supervising teams of editors building entire walls of content reels to hands-on crafting singular, site-specific installations surrounding visitors in iconic IP environments. The last four years have also coincided with a rapid acceleration in generative AI capabilities, and with every new Upfront we are able to leverage the latest advancements to deliver executions that simply weren't possible the year before.

As always, we are also responsible for capturing everyone's collective efforts to show the world what we've done, and so every year, after all of our work is on fully display, you can find me swooping through the venue with a camera (trying not to get in the way of my teammates' shots) to make sure it all looks as good on a computer screen as it does in person.

Survivor 50 Exhibit

Roles: Producer + Editor + Supervisor

This was a surprise treat that kind of dropped into my lap. Our friends at Events & Brand Experiences had been working with the Survivor production team to plan an immersive experience to celebrate and promote the 50th season, and by the time they had combed through all of the physical props, little-known facts and never-before-seen photos, it was clear that the experience itself was going to heavily rely on video.

I personally edited or directly supervised every frame of what went up on every screen, and to have a TV veteran like Jeff Probst rave in all caps emails about how impressive everything looked was itself a kind of recognition you don't often get in the marketing world. It was additionally gratifying to see him and other Survivors from the current season geek out over footage as they walked through the exhibit in person.

Buzzfeed Branded Content

Roles: Editor + Graphics

Buzzfeed doesn't get enough credit for shaping the content landscape that we all live in now. Before it was normal for people to watch shows regularly on YouTube and then share clips from those shows on IG, they were doing it with Tasty. No celebs needed, just real people with good energy matched by good editing and clean visuals.

The sponsor-driven videos were no different, whether it was scripted or unscripted. You almost don't even notice the Bud Lights on screen, because it just feels like a sketch that would organically included beers laying (strategically) around.

Entresto "Find Exercise Anywhere" Campaign

Roles: Editor + Graphics

Easily the most fun I had working in pharmaceutical advertising. I know that's kind of a weird sentence, but I pharma-lanced for a long time and got to wear many hats on everything from pitch videos to final deliverables like these, but very rarely did I get to bring what I would consider to be my Adult Swim sensibilities.

It very much helped that the creative director was a true partner at every level, wanting me to bring ideas into post rather than simply execute something that had already been etched in stone. Abrupt freezes and long awkward pauses, hyper-saturated colors and over-the-top takes… the one thing I remember we ultimately didn't get to keep (and I completely understand why) was the Exercise character blasting off into the sky upon finding a penny. He may have magic powers, but he can't distract from the messaging!

Albert Einstein Foundation "Genius: 100 Visions" Mini-Doc

Roles: Director + Editor + Graphics

I learned a lot on this one. Books, as we think of them today, have been with us for 2000 years. We take it for granted that this form went basically unchanged for that long. Single pages, pressed flat with two-dimensional words and images, bound together into an object. They all look the same, basically just small rectangular boxes. E-books didn't exactly push things further, and if anything they went the other way — formless files you read them on objects made to look like books so that it doesn't feel weird.

Einstein's legacy foundation worked with our agency to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of his Theory of Relativity and the results went far beyond what I would've imagined was on the table, with leaders and influencers from around the world participating collaborative works and collaborative works — Ridley Scott, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Salman Rushdie, Frank Gehry, Barbra Streisand, the list goes on.

The highlight for me was easily this book. As this mini-doc illustrates, it's the first of its kind. I directed, edited and produced it along with many other videos about the larger Genius 100 campaign. This meant studio shoots in Toronto, remote shoots in London and sourcing footage from NASA. I think it's cool as hell and I wish I could afford a copy for myself.

Yamaha "Going Solo" Branded Content Series

Roles: Director + Editor + Graphics

Even if you're cynical about advertising, you have to give it up for this one. The folks at Yamaha genuinely want people to make music, and when you've got music programs getting cut left and right, you don't have to convince me to partner up with the best instrument company out there to make up for it.

I was fortunate enough to be part of the conception of this series, and hands-on executed the entire first season, comprised of multiple mini-docs and long-form podcasts. We did multi-cam studio shoots, sourced and captured b-roll footage, and turned extended interviews into tightly-knit episodes. I had started out in documentary but had never done a podcast before, so getting to bring the skills I had learned at the beginning of my career to a format that I also avidly consume was a reward in and of itself.

Adult Swim

Roles: Editor + Compositor + Post-Production Supervisor

Starting my career in animation was like winning the lottery. I hadn't even graduated film school, and was working one-on-one with show creators to make episodes of Adult Swim shows that I had been watching since I was a teenager. It was unreal.

My first job was Assistant Editor on season 4 of The Venture Bros. I was still in film school, having adjusted my schedule to allow for as many work days as possible. The creator and I would spend hours meticulously adjusting things frame by frame, always on the hunt for anything that could improve a joke or an action sequence, removing a breath here, continuing a camera move to a second shot there… it was a learning experience that easily eclipsed the one I was paying tuition to receive.

Season 4 lead to seasons 5 and 6, and being Assistant Editor lead to being the actual Editor with a capital E. Along the way, I got to work on other shows and occupy other roles, accumulating a creative and technological skillset that very few are allowed to try out. Instead of calling out revisions that had to be made by compositors or animators in other countries, I was making those revisions in-house. Instead of having to wait days or even weeks to see if our notes were properly addressed, the creator and I could work on everything together in real time, staring at the same screen, meticulously noodling with a joke until it finally made us laugh hard enough to move on.

I myself moved on from working exclusively in animation, but I kept watching the shows, because I loved them even before I got to make them myself.

Netflix & Dreamworks

Roles: Editor + Production Coordinator

Hopping from show to show is a universal reality for anyone working in animation, because the timelines are so long that any role will inevitably hit some kind of hiatus on a given project. This is an obstacle for many, because if you specialize in something like storyboarding or compositing and there isn't a show in the middle of that phase at a given moment, there isn't anywhere for you to go.

I was fortunate enough to never have that problem, because being an editor requires you to know at least a little bit of everyone else's job. Since you're at the end of a long pipeline, a necessary part of your job is identifying how far back up that pipeline a given revision needs to go: is the issue happening in the compositing stage, the animation stage, the design stage, or even further? Maybe a sequence was rewritten, but that rewrite happened after certain teams had already started and one person's assignment slipped through the cracks. You might literally be the first person to know, because you're the only one seeing the (literal) big picture.

Infinitely better than identifying who needs to fix something, however, is being able to fix it yourself. No one wants to make an animator or compositor or designer have to drop what they're doing (because they're always doing something) to redo what everyone thought was taken care of days or weeks earlier. And no editor wants to say they can't finish an edit because they're waiting on someone else to fix something. So you start making those fixes, revising composites, animations, and even designs (with the respective team leads' approval) and the next thing you know, you never have to go on hiatus again.

Animated Features

Roles: Editor + Compositor + Post-Production Supervisor

Having cut my teeth as an editor, compositor, production coordinator and post-production supervisor on at least half a dozen cartoon shows, I was entrusted with occupying those roles for two standalone Team Hot Wheels films and one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles special.

I know it's weird to say these were the most intense projects I took on during my time in animation, but they were. When you do a season of TV show, even though it collectively amounts to much more screen time than a movie, the timelines all have buffers because you're not just making one thing with a hard release date, you're making anywhere from 6 to 24 things with staggered release dates. Very often we'd have a season premiere party for a show that we were all still making the final episodes for.

Movies, however, can only exist in two states: finished, or not. And no one is more responsible for bringing a film from one state to the other than the editor. My hands were always literally the last ones to touch something before it was deemed complete. With that, I have one anecdote that I like to share:

It was my last day in LA, finishing final color with the studio's art director (who was in Hollywood) before heading back to New York to cram in any final revisions with the film's animation director (who was in Manhattan) to upload to Mattel so that all contractually-obligated deadlines were met and all of the marketing and distribution stages that happen after a film is finished could stay on schedule.

I had been working 12 hour days every day, but was enjoying myself because the weather and general vibe was still more relaxed than a normal week in New York. Then I got a fever, but couldn't do anything about it because my plane was leaving that night and I had to be on it along with the hard drive that safely housed the movie because this was years before a certain pandemic would force everyone to figure out how to do any of stuff remotely.

So I wake up in LA, work all day in the Hollywood studio, take the hard drive onto the plane, land in New York in the middle of the night, go straight to the Manhattan studio, and with tissues shoved up my nose for a second straight workday without sleep, my friend (the animation director) and I manage to QC every single frame of this thing so that finally, at 6am, we visually confirm that the film had made it to Mattel's server and no one has to call any lawyers to argue about payroll triggers or downstream cost increases due to blown deadlines. I had worked for exactly 40 straight hours, subsisting on extra-strength Tylenol, before finally going home and getting a proper night's sleep in the middle of the day.