I'm a video production and motion graphics director in Tampa. For the last few years that has meant AI-assisted work, animated commercials, cinematic short films, arena-scale motion graphics, where the tools are new but the discipline behind them is not. The work holds up because the craft underneath it came first.

Craft Years

That craft was built over eighteen years before any of it touched AI. I started by building an in-house video department at KelbyOne from a one-man crew, producing Photoshop User TV and owning the video and motion graphics for Photoshop World, a conference that drew around five thousand people. While I was there I worked out a format nobody had asked for, instructor on camera, courses broken into short chapters, that launched the company's online training business and that Lynda.com later restructured to match.

The pattern repeated. At IT University Online I built another studio and production operation from scratch and grew it past seventeen people, then reverse-engineered Final Cut Pro's project files to rebrand entire course libraries without re-editing a frame. At MotionLit I kept getting handed the footage everyone else had written off, a blown-out interview the team had called unusable, and tracked and masked it back to projection quality. Somewhere in there I ran a Department of Defense event's entire arena graphics package alone, every overhead, scoreboard, and three-hundred-sixty-degree banner in an NBA-sized venue.

The AI Shift

The shift to AI started at MotionLit, where the constraint was concrete: legal clients I couldn't show and real footage I couldn't use. AI image and video generation solved it, imaginary scenes that carried the story without exposing anyone. That worked, so I kept going.

Most of what I can do now was built volunteering as the media lead at a local church, where the stakes were real but the room to experiment was mine. A sixty-second animated commercial for Applied Fiber, built across more than half a dozen AI tools and finished by hand in After Effects and Premiere. An eight-week cinematic prayer series. A Walk-Thru Bethlehem promo generated entirely from scratch, no live footage, made so carefully that the goal was for no one to clock it as AI at all. That is where the current toolset stopped being a novelty and became a way of working.

How I Work

Here is the part that matters, because the tools are the easy part to copy. I work story first. I write the narrative and the dialogue, define the emotional arc, and storyboard the piece shot by shot before I generate a single frame. I plan camera movement and framing the way I would if I were standing on set.

Only then do I start generating, and I treat each prompt like a production brief, not a wish. Clear intent, defined limits, explicit rules about what is not allowed to change. AI wants to embellish and reinterpret and improve things you never asked it to touch. When it breaks a rule, I reset the shot and give it new notes, the same way a director would. The discipline is the product. The tools just render it.

What I'm Looking for

What I'm after is straightforward: teams making ambitious things who want real craft underneath the AI, not just speed. The combination of eighteen years of traditional production and current AI fluency is rare right now, and it is most useful to people who care that the work is good, not only that it shipped fast. If that is the kind of work you are doing, I'd like to hear about it. 

Tools

A working set, not a logo wall: Premiere, After Effects, Final Cut, Motion, Cinema 4D, and Photoshop on the traditional side. ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, Nano Banana, Veo, Kling, ElevenLabs, and Suno on the AI side. I occasionally  write and record the music and sound design for my own pieces.