Exploring Generative AI for
concepting, filmmaking, and storytelling.
Compass is a system for mapping how inner experience becomes action — how awareness, capacity, and alignment shape the choices we make, and how those choices ripple outward into the realities we live within.
An AI short film concept that reimagines Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, exploring awakening, perception, and collective reality.
Commercial Workflow
Generative tools function as a full production medium — supporting concepting, iteration, compositing, and release.
A system for navigating inner experience.
Compass began with a simple observation: the conflicts we see in the world often mirror the ones we carry within ourselves.
Over seven years of journaling, reflection, and inquiry, it developed into a visual system for understanding how inner experience unfolds — and the points along that path where genuine choice becomes possible.
The hope is straightforward: that greater clarity, responsibility, and compassion within individuals can gradually translate into greater coherence in the shared world we create together.
Signal Path
A schematic of how inner experience moves from source to distortion and back to clarity. The signal is always present. What changes is how clearly it is received.
Consequence Map
A bird's-eye view of what happens inside the human system when distortion takes hold. At each stage, there is a fork — a moment where experience either deepens into noise or begins to clear. This map shows where those moments are, and what they look like from the inside.
Pre-conscious layer
Before any conscious choice is possible, something else is already happening. The ego intercepts incoming experience and edits it against prior programming — delivering a processed version of reality before awareness has a chance to meet it directly. This diagram maps that mechanism, and the single point where it can be seen.
Master schematic
Taken together, the above three maps describe a single continuous process.
Source
Source is everything that exists — the blank screen and the image projected upon it, the water and the fish swimming within it. From the nothingness of pure potential to the fullness of lived reality, it is not separate from experience but what experience is made of and appears within. Symbolized by the Sun, Source is always present, always whole, and never diminished — only more or less revealed.
Distortion
Distortion is what appears to block or bend the signal of Source. Symbolized by clouds, it moves across what is otherwise clear. Thoughts and feelings arise naturally, but when held, believed, or identified with, they accumulate into structure — creating the sense of something solid where there is only movement. Much of this happens before conscious awareness: experience arrives already edited, already colored by what has been believed before. Distortion is not the presence of thoughts and feelings, but the attachment to them — the act of taking what is passing as what is permanent.
Seeing
Seeing begins with noticing what is already happening. When a feeling is fully allowed, it completes its natural cycle. When a thought is seen clearly, it loses its hold. Seeing is less a sequence than an orientation: turning toward what is present, rather than away from it. What seemed like a problem begins to loosen — not through effort, but through the absence of resistance, like a knot untying itself when no longer pulled tight.
Return
The Return is a remembering. It is the recognition of what remains when distortion settles — a quiet knowing that nothing was ever truly lost. What is revealed is simple: openness, ease, peace, a natural sense of coming home. This peace does not come from changing what is outside, but from no longer resisting what is within. The Return is this recognition, happening again and again, each time more familiar.
AI short film exploring awakening.
A movie theater. Hundreds of audience members wearing hypnotic glasses — each one projecting their inner experience onto the shared screen. The film they're watching is them.
One character's awareness shifts inward without warning. The trance breaks. They look around at the others — still under — and discover the first uncomfortable truth: you cannot wake someone who isn't willing. Gnosis doesn't transfer.
In search of an exit, they enter a tunnel of complete darkness. No projections. No reference points. Only the instruction to know thyself — navigated blind. The tunnel leads back to the exact same theater. There is no elsewhere to escape to.
What changes is how they take their seat. No longer projecting inner shadow onto the shared screen — something else now moves through them. The film ends with a simple message to the audience: Enjoy the show. In the rows nearby, another awareness stirs.
Projection explores perception, collective reality, and the realization that the human experience cannot be escaped, but only engaged with more consciously. Developed using generative AI tools including Midjourney and Runway Gen-3 to prototype environments, characters, and cinematic moments.
Title TreatmentStoryboard Sketch
Sample Frames
Character Exploration
Commercial Workflow
Using Generative AI for prototyping and campaign development.
Generative tools are integrated into my campaign workflow to explore visual ideas and accelerate early concept development.
External models are used to prototype compositions and narrative directions during ideation, while platform-native models take the work through commercial release.
Together, these tools extend the art direction process — enabling rapid visual exploration while maintaining the craft required for large-scale campaigns.
