Born in a garage in Palo Alto in the late 1930s, Hewlett-Packard didn’t just start in Silicon Valley. They started Silicon Valley.

So when HP approached us to create a campaign highlighting their pioneering work with Mixed and Virtual Reality, we devised a concept that both respects their past, and anticipates their future.

Megan Elliot is partnering with HP Education to build a world-class media program with world-class technology, including VR, to push the boundaries for the next generation of storytelling.

Using HP Omnicept’s bioanalytics capabilities such as eye tracking, heart rate monitoring and pupil dilation detection, Seth Cluett and Suzanne Thorpe are able to identify the triggers of stressors in students working with technical historical music equipment for the first time.

By tracking the bioanalytics of users, Makana Chock and the Extended Reality Lab at Syracuse University are able to gain valuable insights to track the consistency of pre-existing biases with a user’s response to a virtual experience.

Educational start up Merlyn Mind brings safe, data-secure voice recognition and AI technology into the classroom.

If your eyes glaze over reading that first sentence, you’re not alone. That’s why the Merlyn Mind team brought in Jongsma + O’Neill to emphasize the humanity behind their technology.

The resulting spot—shot during lockdown in Los Angeles and starring Jongsma + O’Neill’s actual daughter’s actual kindergarten teacher—tells the story of an educator’s first day on the job with the Merlyn Mind’s Symphony smart speaker in her corner.

Born in a garage in Palo Alto in the late 1930s, Hewlett-Packard didn’t just start in Silicon Valley. They started Silicon Valley.

So when HP approached us to create a campaign highlighting their pioneering work with Mixed and Virtual Reality, we devised a concept that both respects their past, and anticipates their future.

The result is The HP Garage Sessions, an ongoing branded documentary series that profiles the visionary scientists and researchers who use HP technologies to transform our world, and places their stories within the brand’s legacy of innovation.

America’s west coast entered the 2020’s in free fall. Cost of living soared, and homelessness spiked. Droughts and wildfires ravaged rural communities. Police and activists clashed in the cities. COVID-19 spread unabated.

In the midst of this chaos, the Dutch public broadcaster HUMAN asked us to reflect on our life in California with a short documentary about wildfire season for their award-winning series 2Doc Kort. 

Over the next two years, this commission grew into a highly-personal, three-film series covering climate change, the future of food, and social unrest in our little corner of the USA.

Convincing stakeholders in the American medical system that AR and VR will transform their industry is not an easy task. 

So when the healthtech startup IKONA approached us to create their first set of VR & AR projects, we focused on producing a suite of patient education experiences that improved outcomes in distinct, measurable ways.

The products we oversaw—including an AR app designed to help patients sort their medications, and a 360° video training intended for new kidney dialysis patients—yielded irrefutable data showing the positive impacts of new technologies, and cleared a path for IKONA’s entrance into the market.

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.

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.