Then. is the work of one person, in conversation with the people who watch and read along.
Slow thinking, written down. Then put into motion.
— who's making this
I studied film at the University of Colorado in the 1990s, in Stan Brakhage's program. My senior thesis screened at Telluride. Since then I've worked in narrative film, branded content, advertising, UX, product design, and entrepreneurship — usually some combination of those at once.
I live in a Norman Cherner mid-century modern house, thirty miles up the Hudson from New York. I shoot on a Komodo X. I've been a caretaker. I've made things that worked and things that didn't. I've spent a long time looking carefully at the difference.
Then. is what I do when I treat that career as one continuous question instead of a series of jobs. The question is what humans are capable of when we design our lives and our worlds deliberately, and what gets in the way when we don't.
The model itself, and the work of developing it. What can we do? What could then be?
The same model, narrowed to seven activities and one life: eat, move, restore, sleep, create, grow, connect.
The studio that runs the work. Method as case study, not just method as method.
a working principle —
The argument the work makes, the work has to also enact. If we're claiming that good design steers what's possible, the design of the videos and the writing has to do that too.
That means: lead with air. Color as event, not wash. Softened forms over machine geometry. Keep evidence of making. Abstract, don't illustrate.
Then. videos are often dreamlike, sometimes psychedelic. Deep dives into single words. Explorations that don't always resolve. Essays that trust the viewer to hold complexity.
The form is allowed to feel like art because the argument that form and content are isomorphic isn't just a theory here. It's the practice.
The governing relationship in everything we make is shoulder to shoulder. We're looking at something together — an idea, a piece of life, a system in the world — and the work is about what we both see.
That means we never diagnose the viewer. We don't imply you're behind, or broken, or that you've been doing it wrong. We start from a different baseline: we all have vast capacity, and modern life is overwhelming. That's the shared condition.
"We" is the default voice. First-person "I" shows up in direct address. "You" is rare and never diagnostic.
Always. Warm. Specific. Generous. Patient.
Often. Playful. Surprising. Precise. Strange.
Never. Hyped. Pedantic. Hustle-coded. Clinical.
No motivational language. No optimization vocabulary. No peak-performance posture. No wellness cliché. No startup-tech aesthetic. No polished AI futurism.
— a small commitment
The model is evolving. The work is showing it evolve. The vocabulary refines, the examples sharpen, the videos get better. We try to keep the seams visible.
If you find a better way to say something we said, we want to know. The letter is one good way to send it. So is email.