About
Designer
Filmmaker
Creative
It's no surprise that media awareness and media literacy are off the charts in our screen-based world.
The challenge is to stay ahead of AI and visual storytelling trends while staying true to classic storytelling best practices that are timeless.
Growing up in a family at the intersection of architecture, design, the music business, and the movie industry, I was fascinated with how art and commerce mixed.
Yet, I always felt that story and spectacle needed to serve a greater purpose.
Media production is complex. It’s easy to let the process distract you from the story you’re trying to tell. In a collaborative medium, how do you lead your team to stay focused on that story?
Over many iterations, outlines, edits, reviews, and tests, how can you ensure that your audience is moved, delighted, informed, maybe even transformed by the work you’ve done?
These are the questions I’ve been working to answer over the past 20 years as a filmmaker, commercial director, editor, art director and creative director.
Ridley Scott gave me a glimpse into how to take the visual medium of film to its highest form, when I worked on the re-release of his sci-fi classic Blade Runner.
Suddenly the vision for the future I saw while living in Tokyo all made sense.
But graphic design would be the medium that got me in the door; doing print campaign work with Dentsu and Hakuhodo on accounts like Honda, Suzuki, and Mitsubishi.
This early entrée to advertising proved to be fortuitous. At the time there was an explosion of motion work needed for digital projects that gave me a chance to step behind the camera.
My first short film - shot on location in Japan - caught the eye of advertising industry magazine Shoot and led them to place me on their ‘25 Directors to Watch’ list.
I signed with a commercial production company and headed to NYC in search of advertising’s roots. Soon I was directing spots and loving it.
But the more I worked with creatives the more I wanted to be upstream on their side of the fence for the ideation, strategy, and branding work.
I began freelance editing and art directing at McCann, Ogilvy, Publicis, Saatchi and other agencies.
There I absorbed branding wisdom from veteran creatives while working on accounts like American Airlines, Ford, Microsoft, P&G, Toyota, and Verizon.
One guiding principle has emerged for me: to tell a compelling story, you must distill the complex into the simple. Or as my daughter says: “tell me a good story daddy…and not too long.”
This requires me to be a translator between the initial spark of an idea and the problem that needs to be addressed. The essence of the vision must be molded into the right form, style, tone, and content.
Accounts like Lunesta, Tradjenta, and Stelara were my entry point into healthcare.
I became drawn to the people working on solutions for the health challenges of our time.
When I found out about the work being done at Johnson & Johnson’s in-house agency, J&J Design — I knew I needed to get involved.
Over 7 years I worked across the spectrum of healthcare: pharma and biotech with Janssen / J&J Innovative Medicine, visioncare with Acuvue and J&J Vision, medtech with Ethicon / J&J MedTech, med device with DePuy Synthes, and consumer health with Johnson & Johnson.
