Andor S2 Featurette - “Designing The Rebellion”
🏆 CLIO AWARD-WINNER 🏆
How to showcase Emmy-winning costume design (and win a Clio for doing it)
Andor season 2 was a masterclass in top-shelf production value, but before it could win an emmy for it’s efforts, it had to show itself off. That’s where we came in.
The goal was simple, the process was not. I poured over hundreds of hours of interviews & transcripts to determine the best moments & soundbites from every main cast member to prepare for this project before making the final selections.
In a show where the costume designer created entire cultures for multiple distinct worlds, choosing which aspects of the work would resonate most with viewers and academy voters was a significant challenge.
Ultimately, we elected to divide the piece into three subjects, first comparing the costumes of Mina-Rau and Chandrila to highlight the range of designer Michael Wilkinson through their contrasting design philosophies, before focusing on the main character Cassian Andor’s costumes for that extra bit of star power shine.
The results? Andor won the Emmy for Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes, and we won a Clio.
Sly Lives! Featurette - “In Conversation with Ahmir & Joseph”
🏆 CLIO AWARD-WINNER 🏆
An authentic conversation about black excellence
Sly Lives! is more than a dissection of the life and times of Sly Stone - it’s a discussion about his struggles, his talent, and the nature of black genius.
For this piece, we wanted to highlight that fact by offering viewers a chance to experience the discussion directly through the words of the men who endeavored to start it.
I designed our interview questions with the theme of discussion in mind - not just to generate as talking points about the film, but as prompts to get the two men to describe their personal experiences & beliefs that relate to the film.
This was complicated by the fact that we weren’t able to shoot Ahmir and Joseph at the same time, so we gave special instructions to the shoot team to allow the two men to go on tangents or even skip over individual questions if it meant allowing the mean to speak passionately and at length about their beliefs that informed the film.
The resulting footage was extensive, but our process ensured we had everything we needed to craft an award-worthy conversation.
Skeleton Crew Special Shoot - “So You Wanna Be A Space Pirate?”
Bringing a beloved franchise back to it’s roots
Skeleton Crew represented a big direction change for the Star Wars IP as a whole, looking back to it’s roots in the 80’s family adventure films like The Goonies. We needed to equally highlight both the talented child cast as well as our lead Jude Law, finding creative ways to introduce them while leveraging the space-pirate adventure aspects of the show.
This campaign was a massive undertaking, involving weeks of research, creative concepting, and revisions for Disneys domestic and international marketing teams, as well as designing a set and handling scheduling for the final shoot. We also ideated around creative director roundtable shoot concepts for inside-the-episode style pieces that would supplement the episodes on-platform.
This particular piece is one I wrote that I was most proud of, introducing the kids and their characterizations from the show while establishing the concept of space piracy with a comedic, goonies-style spin.
The Perfect Couple - Creative Concepting Pitch
Creating the perfect pitch deck
This series was a huge undertaking for Netflix, and we knew in order to win the opportunity to market it would require displaying in-depth knowledge of the source material as well as a level of production prowess that could match the prestige of the series itself.
Our strategy was primarily to showcase our production capabilities by putting a heavy focus on technical shoot concepts that leveraged unique camera setups or filming techniques.
In addition, knowing that the production team behind this series were big fans of the author Elin Hilderbrand and that she would be on the set herself, I personally researched and wrote interview questions for her to include in our pitch that demonstrated our understanding of her work and the fandom around her.
Ultimately, this pitch landed us the BTS campaign, capturing EPK interviews with the cast (including scripting answers for them when necessary) and using the footage to create BTS featurettes around the production.
Fountain of Youth - BTS Creative Suite Pitch
Designing a comprehensive campaign strategy around a terabyte of footage
This pitch for Fountain of Youth came with several major challenges, most notably was the roughly 500 hours of footage we had to parse through for our concepting. In addition, the client was looking for a holistic campaign strategy beyond the scope of a conventional BTS content pitch.
We went through 3 rounds of revisions before we settled on a structure built around three distinct campaign phases and 3 broad categories based on the biggest themes of the film while also further organizing concepts by target audience.
Based on the clients request, we added a 4th broad category consisting of what we called “Extendable Concepts.” Essentially, these were social-forward ideas that could each be extended into a series of posts that stretched throughout the campaign.
All told, this represents one of the more strategically complex pitches I’ve worked on, and I’m proud to say that everything in this deck was accomplished against a deadline of a week by a team of myself and one creative director.
Your Friends & Neighbors - Creative Concept Pitch Deck
Creating standout shoot concepts that meet A-list talent brand expectations
Coming up with ideas for this series was a fantastic opportunity to flex my creative concepting muscles - it’s not every day you get to ideate around a special shoot on a mansion set featuring John Hamm.
Our concepts were designed to be out-of-the-box and eye-catching, fully leveraging our star power and access to the luxurious sets by pitching concepts that showed the actors as themselves in staged-BTS moments.
The real trick was finding a balance between ideas that would stand out with their style or humor while still appealing the suave brands of the A-list talent involved. Talent should be part of the joke, never the target of one.
The ideas in this deck are some of my personal favorites that I’ve pitched, and our client loved my concepting so much they invited us to pitch on 3 following projects over the next five months.
Cobra Kai S6 - BTS Special Shoot
How do you send off a beloved franchise in style?
This special shoot concept pitch for the final season of Cobra Kai was one of the most successful I’ve been a part of - in no small part due to the incredible talent involved.
To meet fan and client expectations, we needed to create ideas that would pay homage to the entire series while still focusing on the plot of the final season itself - we studied the franchise to write in easter eggs and identify fan favorite characters & plot lines we could put our focus on, even designing the shoot set Netflix would use.
Our pitch also included concepts for a series of on-platform, inside-the-episode-style retrospectives, each focusing on one-third of the final seasons episodes and featuring different cast members.
The shoot was incredible, I was personally present to help produce the concepts I’d written and meeting the cast truly cemented in my mind why this series earned such a devoted following. We captured everything from spontaneous laugh-out-loud moments to authentic tears of joy, and we turned it into an incredible finale campaign.