Every Lunar New Year, tourists converge on the Taiwanese village of Pingxi to launch thousands of floating lanterns into the night sky. The lanterns represent the wishes of their owners—and make for one hell of an Instagram post.

But what happens when dawn breaks, the tourists leave, and the thousands of wishes fall out of the sky?

Weaving virtual reality and conventional 2D filmmaking, What Goes Up // Must Come Down fuses two discrete documentaries about the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival into a singular whole, and suggests that our dreams may have staggering, real-world consequences.

Conservation and biotechnology collide in The Ark, a virtual reality documentary that puts viewers face-to-face with the northern white rhino—the world’s most endangered species. 

A groundbreaking example of VR’s capacity to put audiences in places they would not normally have access to, The Ark invites viewers to walk alongside the rhinos’ bodyguard squad in Kenya, and meet the San Diego-based scientists using rhino DNA to create new animals inside a petri dish.

How does a 177-year-old journalistic institution find its place as a storytelling innovator without losing its trusted voice?

This is the question that animated our three-year collaboration with The Economist Media Lab, and gave form to the award-winning experiences produced during Kel’s tenure as the magazine’s Senior Media Lab Fellow.

During this time, Kel spearheaded The Economist’s interactive and immersive efforts, helping them staff up and build out a VR studio within the magazine’s Media Lab, and shaping the creative direction of their productions.

We created and directed two documentary series for the subscription-based Dutch journalism platform De Correspondent:

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) tells the stories of creative technologists who use their skills to craft applications that critique and undermine the goals of Big Tech, and;

3 x Utopia takes a look at a wild collection of amateur astronauts, church security guards, and zombie-obsessed doomsday preppers carving out space for themselves away from mainstream society.

When Siemens and branding agency Virtual Identity asked us to direct a documentary for their /answers campaign, we jumped at the opportunity.

The brief was enticingly slim: create a film that highlights the unexpected ways Siemens’ technology impacts our everyday lives. 

Shot over the course of a week in Mumbai, our documentary The Milky Way profiles the young animal welfare activists behind Animals Matter to Me, who use milk processed with Siemens’ equipment to keep their rescue shelter running.

A hidden synagogue in the mountains of Indonesia. A goldmine in Suriname run by the descendants of runaway slaves. A white supremacist enclave in the South African desert. 

These are only a few of the communities brought to light in Empire, the Emmy-nominated immersive documentary project about the current day legacy of Dutch colonialism.

Shot in ten countries over four years, Empire uses nonfiction filmmaking and cutting-edge technology to reveal how the actions of a handful of 17th-century traders still shape our world today.

As the original US Correspondents for VPRO and Hivos’ pioneering TV/online show Metropolis, we directed, produced, shot and edited over 35 short documentaries covering a wide range of subjects including Vietnam War reenactors, volunteer border patrol squads, and pandrogynous rock stars.

Metropolis was streaming TV before streaming TV: each weekly episode brought together clips from documentaries from around the world, commissioned from local correspondents, and organized around a common theme. In addition, VPRO also made each of the correspondents’ uncut films available online, building an impressive international audience.

We help organizations and individuals expand their creative horizons through consultation and public speaking. We specialize in guiding storytelling projects through the creative process, and in sharing our direct knowledge of new storytelling technologies. 

We tailor our services to each client, based on their specific needs. We’ve spoken at SXSW and Tribeca, curated events for the International Documentary Association and Film Independent, and provided story and script  to filmmakers at Redbull Media House and 88Rising.

Whether you’re looking for an inspiring presentation or a full review of your media strategy, we can get you where you need to go.

New mediums require new creative methods, which is where rapid prototyping and creative exploration comes in. Recent pilots and prototypes include:

-Car Seat, a game-engine-based VR experience about family conflict developed and prototyped during the Sundance New Frontier Artist-in-Residence program;

–EXIT, a mobile storytelling experiment about America’s obsession with the apocalypse, developed in collaboration with POV and presented at SXSW 2016;

–Top to Bottom, a pilot about wealth inequality in the US made in collaboration with the interactive video studio Eko.