I’ll be working with exactly 2 startups on custom studio builds in Q2, including end-to-end content production. DM @bephrem if interested. Otherwise, this article gives you all the basics to get started yourself.

The full shopping list is here. You can jump to the build section if you’d like to skip the intro (it’s lengthy).

The Problem

Every startup has the same basic problem. You ship features every week, and you want to talk about them to the public. To do this, you need to commit your voice and image to film in a compelling way, so you can speak to thousands of people. Potential customers, employees, and investors. This problem repeats every month. It never goes away.

You consider your options. You could:

(1) Hire a Crew, Shoot In-Office: A camera crew will come, spend 2 hours setting up lighting and 2-3 cameras, then charge a flat day rate (maybe ~$3-8k) just for footage. Across 4-5 videos/mo $12-40k in content spending. This is unsustainable. I’ve observed this setup process dozens of times. It requires a location scout every time, with new lighting & sound considerations. You get 1-2 pieces of content, w/o integrated consideration of a communications roadmap for the company. And most offices don’t look good; they look like startup offices.

(2) Hire a Crew, Rent a Location: You can rent one of the few filming locations that look good in San Francisco, then run your own camera setup, or work with a crew. This is also not ideal as it takes you out of your office and the flow of your day. You face the same setup / teardown problems, although you get good production design for “free” (but even then you get a generic look that isn’t tailored to your company & the tone you want).

(3) Buy Gear & Film Yourself: This seems like an enticing option; you just need to buy an FX3 & some RODE Wireless Go’s, right? Until you realize that compelling film work actually has many moving parts that make it watchable:

• Writing: What are we actually going to talk about (topic selection + framing)? At what timestamp do certain important points land (estimating watcher attention span + runtime)?

• Cinematography: There are many invisible principles to making an image “easy to read” to the eyes & pleasing to look at. Almost no one is getting them right on X & LinkedIn. You need to know the rules behind lighting and composing an image, which are non-obvious.

• Production Design: Every pixel of the frame must be load-bearing. Almost no one is designing their sets with a unique identity that is an extension of their product’s visual language. The same care put into a digital design system (typography, color, spacing) — should extend to the physical world.

• Performance (Acting): The most important visible component is how the people on-screen make the watcher feel. Does the presenter transfer good energy to the watcher? Does this host-guest combo have good chemistry? This is what keeps people watching and brings them back. This takes an eye for what isn’t there in a performance.

• Sound: Most videos on X & LinkedIn have mediocre sound. Not that important if the content is good, but gives a presence boost for the watcher if they can clearly hear the speaker, and the spatial logic of the room can be felt. Good sound lets people watch longer and more easily. Getting dialog polish right can completely change how an image is felt.

• Music (Score): The music needs to be in conversation with the rhythm of story information unfolding. It will need to hit at certain moments, and supplement the overall tone of the performance.

• Editing: Picking the best takes that cohere. Graphics. Motion.

• Coloring: Footage needs to get colored. This seems optional until you see a before & after of footage that has been properly colored. Below is a before & after from a recent shoot I did with @arlanr, with my coloring treatment notes. Coloring can profoundly transform how an image reads.

You can see how the needs of the medium stack up. Founders with growing companies don’t have the time to run a production process end-to-end like this.

(4) Hire a Freelancer or Head of Media: Find a pluralist visual thinker who is also mission-aligned with your product. Not impossible, but difficult. Most freelancers don’t have rigorous film training. And most of the best visual artists don’t care about B2B SaaS or AI. Some will. The best ones will be thinking about the above.

(5) Hire an Agency on Retainer: If you’re at the stage where you can afford an agency, you can hire them for larger brand campaigns or recurring content. Once a large brand campaign is delivered, agencies operating at that level will have to context-switch to other large productions for other companies. Recurring content producers work with many clients and won’t embed with you at an organizational level. What is really needed is a producer deeply embedded in the product, tracking changes every week, suggesting new pieces — fully in the loop.

(6) iPhone: Just use an iPhone. If you have something really raw & true to say, iPhone and room audio (“low production value”) could connect even better. But for most regular content, this just makes it harder to look at & hear you.

(7) Do Nothing: Many startups just don’t produce content when it would be low-hanging fruit to do so. I see this all the time. Founders with good engagement on text posts & compelling personalities that would do well on-screen — that just never have the time or consider making videos regularly.

…

Most of these aren’t permanent options. 5/7 are temporary fixes. The ideal scenario is that you own the means of media production. A permanent studio (whatever the scale) built around your company’s identity, producing content on your schedule, indefinitely. To understand why this matters, let’s look at what media even is, from its cultural to its commercial applications.

Media and Story

Media is how we form and shape our understanding of the world. As much as we’d like to believe we are “independent thinkers,” our thoughts and beliefs are primarily constrained by what we have seen and what we have heard throughout our lifetimes. Born ignorant, through a series of media transformations, we come to an understanding of the world. We are perpetually at the mercy of what we are shown and not shown (narrative constraint).

Media’s existence is necessitated by a hard physical constraint. We are born to separate bodies & minds that need to constantly sync to a relatively aligned view of the world for things to get done. This alignment problem is as old as human cooperation. Storytelling is the first technology ever invented to solve this coordination problem.

Story sits inside media as latent structure. It encodes the patterns we impose on experience to make it meaningful. A beginning, a middle, an end — causality. Character. Stakes. Story is a cognitive structure that makes experience transmissible. Without story, there are just events without a prescribed meaning. When media with story information is consumed, experience is transmitted.

Forms of Media

There are many forms of media, each shaping how meaning moves through the world:

• Oral (the first): Spoken word. The original medium — no technology required. Every civilization developed it independently.

• Image (the 2nd): Painting, drawing, photography. Static visuals making the seen world persistent.

• Written (the 3rd): Text on a surface. Thought made portable, permanent, and copyable.

• Audio (Recording): Music, podcast (longform speech). Recordings freed oral storytelling from real-time constraint and made it portable for the first time.

• Cinema (Film/Video): Moving image + sound + time. The most complete simulation of lived experience humans have ever built — addressing sight, sound, motion, and emotion simultaneously.

• Broadcast: Television and mass radio. One-to-many at scale for the first time. A single signal reaches every home simultaneously, creating shared monoculture and centralized narrative power.

• Print: The Gutenberg press made writing infinitely copyable and cheap. For the first time, one person’s ideas could reach millions without distortion, enabling mass literacy, mass politics, and mass religion.

• Digital/Internet: All previous forms containerized and delivered over a near-instant network. The first truly bidirectional medium at scale.

  • Social Feed: The current dominant form — an infinite, algorithmically sequenced scroll optimized purely for attention capture.

• LLM Chat: The newest layer. Many now treat AI conversations like their closest advisor. Extraordinary narrative power that’s still under-discussed.

I’m probably missing other ones (games, live interactive media, and on and on). But these are all ways that meaning moves through the world. Your company needs to be fluent in at least one of them.

Media is Infrastructure

I wanted to lay the above foundation because most of the technology industry has a very narrow understanding of what media is for or what it can do. The industry term for commercial media is “content”. A container word treating every medium as a pipe, and whatever flows through it as an interchangeable commodity. It reduces the most complete simulation of lived experience humans have ever built to a unit of marketing output.

As someone who has spent 400+ hours watching cinema in the past year, it is clear to me that media is far more than marketing collateral. It is a transformation mechanism. Taking people from point A to point B in their understanding of your company, the product, and the world. Most companies reason about their narrative on a very narrow time-horizon (<3mo) and scale of impact (“let’s share this feature we just made”).

Founders will usually finish a feature, realize they need a video for it, reach out to their immediate network for a videographer, record a video, publish it, and then be done.

Venture capitalists will usually have a portfolio of interesting founders they can talk to, bring them onto some sort of long-form show or podcast, record a 1-hour video, publish, and then be done.

If we’re honest, this is the state of storytelling in tech for 80-90%+ of companies and venture capital firms. Wholly uncreative, yet functional. It works (and really well sometimes), because (1) the quality bar for storytelling on X & LinkedIn is incredibly low and (2) inventory is incredibly low relative to demand (attention surplus).

Few companies are treating their media as infrastructure. Just as product infrastructure is planned and roadmapped with total seriousness and permanence, a company’s storytelling infrastructure needs to be equally as considered.

Most startup problems are downstream of storytelling:

• Acquiring Talent: The best talent works for companies worth joining. The companies worth joining are telling the best stories about why they exist and why they’re going to win.

• Attracting Capital: Venture investors pattern-match on conviction before they take a meeting. Public media is your first pitch. Most founders don’t realize how much due diligence happens before anyone reaches out or replies to inbound.

• Acquiring Customers: People buy from companies they trust. Trust is built from repeated contact over time — not a single video. The accumulation of consistent presence is what moves someone from aware to convinced.

• Retaining Employees: Employees rally around a strong why behind the work they’re doing. Stories about what you are building create this shared bonding mechanism and keep people tethered to why they’re building.

• Public Perception / Positioning: Your public narrative shapes how the industry positions you relative to competitors over time. You either shape it or it shapes itself without you.

Good media strategy is simply an organic multi-year conversation you have with the world about who your company is and why it exists. It is a cloud, a consciousness, built and pointed in your direction. Every point of contact makes people feel what it is like to use your product and work with you.

Non-Linear Effects: While product functionality is immediately measurable (it works or it doesn’t), the impact of stories a company tells about itself are only observable in a very long-range, non-linear way. You might release a podcast episode that someone listens to in 3 months, then returns to your venture firm in 3 years for an eventual investment. There was no way to track this ROI because the effects were impossible to measure and they spanned years. You just have to trust it’s happening and “read the room”.

X & LinkedIn Are Underproduced

This is hard to see if you aren’t a video publisher, but X & LinkedIn are heavily underproduced for video, and the X & LinkedIn algorithms are very generous in awarding reach.

3 months ago, right as I was thinking this, a post from @_kaitodev came up in my feed that captured this well:

Here is the tweet and here is the transcription:

“Content creation is vastly unexplored. You have a billion users on LinkedIn, and like 3 million active posters weekly. That means that’s like 997 million are not posting at all. Lots of people want to consume. Not a lot of people are producing. Please, make content. You have big attention that you can get. And money :)”

And I quote tweeted:

I don’t have extensive data to confirm this attention surplus, but I have empirical evidence just from…observing how videos have performed on X over the past 3 years. I closely study how views are served minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour — where posts top out, how topics surface and subside, how the “For You” feed builds itself. And it’s pretty clear that reach on X is pretty easy right now, even without highly polished film work.

And these aren’t fake views, these are real people becoming convinced and changing their opinions about whole industries & companies. This is a new media platform sitting right under people’s noses, and it’s invisible for those w/o the data to see clearly.

TBPN Owning Broadcast

Somewhere along the journey, TBPN must have realized this gross attention surplus. They started the show informally (in Oct 2024), but on some level, they probably felt there was a missing media platform they wanted to see. This platform was specifically broadcast. A whole industry opened the X timeline daily, and there was no real-time news source with trusted face(s) to help the industry (and the world) make sense of it all. John & Jordi were perfectly suited to do this work due to their backgrounds, but even at the time, no one was taking tech media seriously.

It was sitting in plain sight. To own the narrative of the most powerful industry in the world you just had to (1) be the right people to do the job (of course), Jordi & John have the exact chemistry, charisma, and level of insight to even host and make the show what it is (2) hire a producer and a ton of interns in LA to rip content into the X & LinkedIn feed (while posting on YouTube, Instagram, & TikTok as tertiary platforms).

Fast-forward 1 ½ years to a $100M+ acquisition (“low hundreds of millions”) by OpenAI.

TBPN is an X-first media platform, with 333k+ followers on X, 30k+ on LinkedIn, 70k+ on YouTube, and 30k+ on Instagram. This is the first time that a big dollar sign has been placed on the trust and attention of a whole industry. Now with a market cap, X-first, “tech media,” is legitimized for the first time in its nascent 2-3 year existence.

The Conclusion

If you are a startup where your audience is primarily on X and LinkedIn, you should begin producing video content for the platforms. There is real money in trust, customer attention, and positioning being left on the table that is far lower than the cost of building a studio and producing.

The following will explain how to do this.

The Studio

Foundations

The best way to explain a studio concept to you is through example. Showing you what good writing (dramatic structure), cinematography, production design, performance, sound, & coloring look like. If you understand the basic principles of a fixed studio setup, you can extend it to various visual problems you’ll face.

I can’t cover 4 years of film school here, and none of the following is even a fraction of exhaustive. But the following sets a foundation for understanding the kit list later.

Cinematography

First, we will talk about the very bare basics of cinematography. We will work with the below sample video I shot with the great @jia_seed. The video is a personal narrative delivered in a sit-down format, compressed into a 1-minute Twitter attention span. Graphics are intentionally minimal; it is oral storytelling in a cinematic container.

Cinematography is the art of telling a story through moving images. When watching a video, people are “reading” the image, the same way they read a novel page by page. This reading happens very fast, and instead of reading letters, we read faces, body language, motion, color, exposure, objects, visual patterns, and on and on. What is around characters (production design) & how they are making us feel (performance) are all absorbed subconsciously.

Most of the story for our studio will be told through the production design of the set. Above, we filmed in Jia’s workspace in San Francisco. When choosing the frame I kept 6 key attributes in mind:

1. Area of Interest (Focal Point): What is the precise piece of the frame that the watcher’s eyes will be fixated on? Everything in the frame either works with or against this visual gravity.

2. Planes of Contrast: Our eyes are drawn to movement and contrast in a frame. Where are the areas of contrast in the frame (where sharp changes in color, exposure, or shape happen)? How do they interact with the focal point of the image? If you rewatch some of your favorite movies, you will find that actors’ eyes routinely get placed on hard lines of contrast in the image because our eyes move there.

3. Exposure: Exposure is the amount of light a region of the image receives. We want the face well-exposed. Effortless to read. Above, Jia’s face is very easy to read, the sky accentuating/highlighting the top region of the frame we are looking at.

4. Depth: How far back does the image reach? To reveal 3-dimensional space so we can inhabit it? The more depth an image has, the more story information we can absorb, which naturally creates interest. Most studios in tech lack depth.

5. Color: Jia’s wardrobe is coincidentally (and rightfully) muted to allow the exposure on her face to shine, making her easy to read and listen to.

A full breakdown video can be found here, as well as a breakdown PDF.

For our studio, the main principles for cinematography will be:

1. Make the face easy to read: Expose well for the face, if the space justifies, light for the space first then the face. Since we will just have 1 or 2 people talking, being able to read facial expressions will be critical. It’s the main mode of communication.

2. Find depth: We don’t want a flat photography studio look. Depth gives people visuals to chew on so they want to stay in the world they’re watching.

3. Control wardrobe: Keep it neutral and make it work with the overall set color.

Production Design

Production design is the intentional construction of space, furniture, light, color, texture, and objects within a frame to carry meaning rather than just occupy space.

Almost no one in tech is doing production design well. The current state of production design in tech is: laptop, table, books, wall.

Exhibit A (the tweet)

Exhibit B (the tweet, did 1M impressions mainly because of the announcement itself, but video definitely played a role in extending the reach)

Exhibit C (the tweet, the most common studio design perpetrated — wood acoustic panels off Amazon + Shure mics on table + overhead lights flooding the room with exposure)

Exhibit D (anthropic youtube — anthropic is doing a good job)

For our studio, we will want to intentionally choose every object that ends up in the frame. The chairs, table, cups, walls, & visible lighting elements. No room for visual clutter, everything is load-bearing. And somehow avoid being visually trite, while avoiding overinventing for the sake of it.

Writing & Performance

Every story has a beginning, middle, and end, which ultimately connects to a meaning. There is a problem we stay to watch get resolved; when it is resolved, we are done watching.

Let’s look again at the Jia piece. It’s so short and simple that it is a good learning ground for basic dramatic structure.

A dramatic “beat” is the smallest unit of change in a story — a shift in emotion, relationship, understanding, or stakes. These beats are what keep people watching.

Here’s where they are located in the short Jia video:

• 2s — Dramatic Premise: “Moved to San Francisco and didn’t know anyone.” The story is set in motion.

• 6s – Escalating Conflict: Dropping internships at Disney and Intuit to chase startups. Stakes and desire appear.

• 20s – Deep Empathy: Real stutter kept in — vulnerability makes her relatable.

• 26s – Breakthrough: “And surprisingly this worked…” We feel the character progressing.

• 47s – Resolution: “All that matters is just who you are as a person…” Everything pays off with meaning.

If your video is missing some sort of dramatic spine, it will sit inert and be unwatchable. You have to create stakes that are true to the thing you’re talking about. They often won’t be that compelling. And that’s ok. They just need to be there, and you need to have considered it.

Sound

Sound is deceptively difficult to do well. There’s a difference between dialog that is legible, easy to hear, and dialog that puts us in the room with the speakers. For our studio, we need clear and crisp dialog, while also creating a sense for the spatial logic of the room.

Here’s a sample where the room’s spatial logic is expressed in the sound:

Notice how every piece of the frame is controlled. The chairs, table, glasses, clothing, my clipboard — are all in conversation with each other. Everything has been designed to support the story and accentuate focus on the speakers. Also, notice how the footsteps pan & have spatial integrity to where they are coming from in the frame. These sound choices are logical to the scene and, most importantly, put you in the room.

Score (Music) & Color

Finally, we’ll touch on score (and throw in coloring as a quick note). I have a sample from a 6-part series I shot with Arlan (again). Below is a 2-minute commercial spot for Nia’s research paper parsing functionality. The ambient score accentuates the depth of the room, creates curiosity, and has a slight volume scoop at the start when the camera smoothly snap-tilts up to reveal Arlan’s eyes.

Performance, cinematography, and score all cooperate to create a viewing experience that moves in lock-step. For content coming out of our studio, we’ll be shooting on static cameras (no movement, unless an operator is on-site), but the same principles of score coordinating with transitions / setting / story apply. It’s all 1 cohesive thing.

For color, here’s the before and after (with notes):

Principles, Not a Blueprint

The above just covers the core principles that make contained film work like this compelling. Even in a simple, fixed, studio setup like this, good performance, production design, cinematography, score, & sound — can make something worth watching.

The Build

So now let’s build our theoretical studio. It will just be a person sitting in a chair with 2 cameras pointed at them. A medium shot (to capture environment and body context), and a medium close-up shot (to capture facial expressions and character interior). Really simple.

Our studio needs to solve 9 fundamental problems:

1. Image Capture: We need cameras. With the right lenses. On tripods. With continuous power and memory to record to.

2. Monitoring: We need to see the image we are capturing on a big screen. On a tighter budget, this is optional, but a display monitor gives us the ability to see multiple camera feeds at once, from 1 physical standing position. We can clearly judge:

   1. framing

   2. composition

   3. exposure

   4. contrast

   5. color

   6. focus

   7. background separation

3. Sound: We need to capture dialog with clarity and presence. Both are achieved via proper mic placement.

   1. Clarity is ensuring every word is intelligible without effort. Listeners shouldn’t have to work to understand what’s being said.

   2. Presence means the voice feels like it’s coming from a real person in a real space. The dialog quality creates a sense of “being in the room”. Many clip-on mics produce functional audio, clear and intelligible, but you feel like you’re listening to a clip-on mic. A properly placed boom will put you in the room with spatial bearings.

4. Lighting: We need to (1) expose the speaker’s face with soft light, (2) add texture to the backdrop / back wall to accentuate the focal point of the image, & (3) add any other practical lighting to the scene to distribute sources of exposure throughout the frame, creating more depth to the overall image.

5. Production Design: For our minimal studio, we’ll just have 2 production-design elements (1) a hand-painted muslin tarp backdrop, held up by stands, and (2) a chair. just a straight-up single chair, to sit on. That’s it.

6. Power: We will need to distribute power to our cameras (for continuous power), monitor, sound mixer, and lighting.

7. Safety: We will need sandbags for any stands (so they don’t tip over).

8. Set Management: We’ll want spike tape to mark the position of cameras, lighting, furniture, and chairs (so we can restore the frame at any time and just hit record). Gray card for white balance, zipties for cables, clapper for audio sync.

9. File Storage & Transfer: We need a continuous system for getting footage from camera cards to post-production reliably after every shoot. Hard drives for on-set storage (SSDs if you have the budget). Optionally, a Mac Mini can live at the studio for full-resolution cloud file upload (more on this later).

Each section will start with the shopping list, then I’ll explain why I made the choices I made.

Image Capture (shopping list)

shopping list

1. Sony FX3A (2x) (link)

2. Sony 100mm f/2.8 STF (link)

3. Sony 85mm f/1.8 (link)

4. Sachtler 75/2 Mark II Aluminum Tripod (2x) (link)

5. Sony 128GB SF-M Tough Series UHS-II SDXC Memory Card (4x) (link)

Camera + Lenses

You don’t need a professional cinema body like an ARRI Alexa, or Sony Burano. And you don’t need cinema lenses.

The highest you need to go in camera body is an FX3, and for glass, Sony lenses. Most character in color, contrast, and texture can be added in post-production. We just need a clean, flexible image.

Lenses

The 85 & 100mm both flatter the face (as telephoto lenses do) and have a controlled, compressed look that create focus on the subject. Both are close in focal length, so that cuts between the angles feel controlled and have similar environmental compression. The 100mm STF renders the background with unusually smooth falloff and can be used for either the medium or medium close-up.

Tripods

Sachtler is a long-standing camera support brand that makes excellent tripods. There are cheaper options on Amazon, but if you’re going to place a $6,000+ camera + lens on something, you want it to be very, very stable and reliable.

Cheaper tripods break down over months as you open and close them. Although our studio cameras will never move, better to just buy it right once. Or…get a cheaper tripod if you want. It will break on you eventually, but it will be delayed relative to how much you open and close it (I’ve had 3 cheap tripods off Amazon deteriorate on me over ~6-12 months of use).

SD Cards

The Sony TOUGH cards are molded into a single durable piece and are unlikely to break. There are cheaper options for cards that have write lock switches (which are undesirable). Really up to you, the studio isn’t moving anywhere, but I just like buying what will last (especially because this is a professional/commercial setup).

Monitoring (shopping list)

shopping list

1. Lilliput 31.5” 4K HDMI Monitor (link)

2. Neewer C-Stand w/ Casters (link)

3. VESA Mount (link)

4. 35’ HDMI Cable (2x) (link)

5. HDMI Right Angle Adapter (2x) (link)

The Stand

The VESA mount grips the back of the monitor (4 screw holes), then clamps to the top of the stand. The stand is rollable so people can move the image around so anyone can see.

The Cables

SDI is the professional standard for moving video over cable. Teradek for wireless transmission. The FX3 does not have SDI, so we use HDMI. HDMI will come out of the cameras and go into the back of the monitor.

We use right-angle adapters to reduce strain on the FX3’s HDMI port and keep the connection secure.

Sound (shopping list)

shopping list

1. MixPre-6 II (link)

2. Sennheiser MKH 50 (link)

3. K-Tek Boom Pole (link)

4. Matthews C-Stand (link)

5. Matthews Grip Head (link)

6. K-Tek Boom Cradle 2 (link)

7. XLR Cable (25') (link)

8. Sony 2x Lavs + Receiver (UWP-D27) (link)

9. Sony MDR-7506 (link)

10. Gaffer Tape (55yd) (link)

11. AA Batteries (20-pack) (link)

Overview

All sound goes into a mixer. It can record up to 8 tracks (support multiple speakers). XLR connectors are the professional standard for moving audio. Boom mics (the ones you see operators with poles on movie sets move around) provide superior audio with a rich frequency range. When you think “that audio sounded like a movie,” it almost certainly came from a boom microphone. The FX3 supports 2 XLR inputs and one 3.5mm input (which you can’t use at the same time as the XLR inputs). We will not use any of these and instead rely completely on the mixer to record audio.

Boom Mic

The Sennheiser MKH 50 sounds natural, rejects room noise well, and makes voices feel like they exist in a real space. I personally love the DPA 4017b’s for their superior clarity and detail, but they’re on the pricier side.

The boom mic attaches to a mount that comes with it (you can get a shock mount if you want, but optional) → that mount has a female screw, the boom pole screws into it → the boom pole holder cradles the boom → the boom pole holder is gripped onto by the c-stand grip head → the c-stand grip head goes on top of the c-stand (5/8” baby pin) → XLR goes from the boom pole (which has a female XLR port) into the mixer.

Boom Mic Placement

The most important thing for sound quality is mic placement. Worth repeating because it will save you hours and hundreds of $$$ of post-production headache and disappointment. The most important thing for sound quality is mic placement.

You will position the boom above your subject (yourself, probably), with the boom pointing down from above at a 45° angle. Pointing at the chest / mouth area. Slightly in front of the mouth, where the sound is traveling. 6-12 inches from it. The closer the better. Every inch matters.

This has real commercial consequences. A wrong mic placement capturing too much room audio will lead to lower video retention and lower reach simply because it is harder to hear the speaker. Rich sound capture stands out on a timeline of videos with poor sound capture.

I can’t stress how easy this is to get wrong. If I’m not there or a good video person you know isn’t there to check the audio, it is deceptively easy to let mediocre audio capture slip by unnoticed. Because it will sound functional and “just work,” but it won’t wow you. It should wow you and call you to attention.

Lav Mic

I added a lav mic for backup, so you’d run both a boom ++ lav mic for redundancy into the mixer. The Sony UWP-D27 has a receiver that will run a 3.5mm jack into the mixer.

Lav Mic Placement

Place the lav on the chest, centered, 6-8 inches below the mouth. A lot of great videos on YouTube on lav mic placement. It’s truly an art.

I included gaffer’s tape for securing the mic wherever you put it.

Monitoring

Headphones for monitoring (industry standard). Another rule that will save you a lot of pain and despair: always have someone monitor the mixer live while filming. Anything can happen while recording; you have no idea what sound is being written to those cards unless live ears are listening. A cable can malfunction, the mixer can get unplugged, the mic placement might drift, there might be ambient noise running you don’t notice, but the mic will capture it clearly.

If you’re filming solo, at least have eyes on the gain levels of the mixer, make sure things are flashing and alive, and…working.

Dialog Editing

Additional note — going through an additional step of dialog editing can make a night and day difference in the clarity and presence of your final dialog (think “sounding like a Super Bowl commercial” vs “sounding like a YouTube video”).

Here is a before (no score) and after (dialog polish + score + mix) of the “research paper” video with Arlan. Notice how before, you feel like you’re in a big echoey room. It pulls you away from focusing on Arlan’s words, and instead, your attention goes to your position in the room. This could be the right story decision in other cases, but in this case, it only detracts from getting our message across.

After dialog polish, you feel like you’re “inside his voice,” receiving it directly. You’re locked in on his words, and your attention does not drift elsewhere.

Lighting (shopping list)

shopping list

1. Aputure 600c Pro II (link)

2. Matthews C-Stand (link)

3. 6x6 silk diffusion rig

   1. Matthews 6x6’ Silk (link)

   2. Matthews Frame (6 x 6') (link)

   3. C-Stand (10’) (2x) (link)

   4. Grip Head (2x) (link)

4. OR, softbox

   1. Aputure Light Dome (5’) (link)

5. Amaran 60x Bi-Color (link)

6. Impact Light Stand (link)

7. Cinefoil (link)

Key Light

So let’s revisit the medium shot on our studio subject (I pulled this still from Shotdeck, a shot reference site filmmakers use).

When lighting this scene, we need to think about 3 planes of exposure (1) the subject (torso + face), (2) the backdrop, & (3) the overall room (ambient).

There are 2 lights active in this setup. (1) There is a big diffuse “key light” coming in off screen-right to expose the subject’s face & torso, and (2) there is a light coming in off screen-left to add texture to the backdrop (near the focal point of the image, which is the subject’s eyes, siphoning attention center-frame).

The Aputure 600c will be our key light for the subject. It is powerful enough to overpower strong sunlight coming in from windows to expose our subject well. It will emit a hard light that we need to diffuse. We have many options for diffusion.

Here are 2:

1. 6x6 Diffusion Silk: The wider the surface area of a diffusion fabric & the farther back the light source before it hits it, the softer and more diffuse the light. You can check out this diffusion fabric test on YouTube to see how different diffusions create different qualities of light on skin.
   
   I chose silk because it fully diffuses the light behind it, eliminating hot spots, while preserving the warmth and color accuracy of the source. The Matthews 6 x 6’ frame holds the silk. It is on the pricier side, so you could get away with just hoisting the silk between 2 c-stands (grip heads would bite into the fabric & you’d spread it taut).
   
   There is a big qualitative difference between light diffused by a big silk cloth vs using a softbox. It is more ethereal and cinematic.

2. 5’ Softbox: This is an alternative. A softbox attaches to the front of the Aputure to soften the light that comes out of it (it twists and locks to the front of the light, into what’s called a “Bowens mount”). The light this produces is very soft, softer than any smaller softboxes. Still not as great as silk, but it’s a more portable option.
   
   Use the grid that comes with it to control the light spread, keeping it focused on a subject. Keep the grid off if you want to boost ambient exposure in the whole space + behind your subject + your subject themselves.

Foil

The cinefoil is this rigid, aluminum foil-like foil (but much stiffer). Similar to barn doors, it allows you to shape the light coming out of fixtures.

Backsplash

We only need a small light for the backsplash. We can use the cinefoil to shape it how we please.

Hairlight

This isn’t on the shopping list, but you can add an extra light, place it behind your subject, and aim it at the back of their head to create a “rim light”/“hairlight”. This creates an accentuated “halo” of exposure behind your subject, creating further background separation and making the image easier to read.

You can also add a touch of light to the shadow side of the face for what’s called a “kicker” to create more dimension on the face. Good video on all this here.

Reading the Face

Our main goal with lighting is to make the face easy to read and give room elements a proper relative exposure. If other elements in the frame are competing for exposure, it will take a longer time for a watcher to parse the image.

Comprehension should be instantaneous, without suppressing other exposures to the extent that the room becomes dark and moody.

Working with a Cinematographer

If it’s in budget, I strongly recommend consulting a local cinematographer. Have them walk through your office, and ask them where placing the studio would be best. They will help you plan around the sun relative to time of day, potential framing, and just overall make the image look great.

You want decisions passing through a real artist’s eyes (which is why most studios and productions in tech look bad; they aren’t passing through a real artist’s eyes, someone who literally lives off making beauty).

Production Design (backdrop + furniture) (shopping list)

shopping list

1. Hand-painted Muslin Backdrop (10x12ft) (link)

2. C-Stand (10’) (2x) (link)

3. Grip Head (2x) (link)

4. Paracord 550 (link)

5. chair options (quickly grabbed these)

   1. Past Life Chair (link)

   2. Gimlet Chair (link)

   3. Haiku Dining Chairs (link)

   4. Armchair (link)

Backdrop

We can get the hand-painted muslin backdrop from Etsy.

The main idea is that we want to create a sense of depth while neutralizing background components that are not essential for viewing in the image. Every item in the frame must be interrogated for meaning. Does it improve the frame’s balance? Visual rhythm? Distribute colors better? Reveal environmental information? Or is it just there to be there? In the final case, it should always be removed.

Chair

A chair. As always, color, texture, material should work with the overall set.

If you want, we can add a table, then put a laptop on it.

Working with a Production Designer

The production design is most of the viewing experience for a fixed setup like this. If you want a custom-tailored solution that looks cinematic, you need to consult with a production designer. If you just place stuff around yourself, it can work…but it usually won’t look great.

A production designer will bring a trained eye to the space — someone who thinks about color, texture, and object placement as visual language. Worth the consultation fee for the first build.

Power (shopping list)

shopping list

1. Power Strip (13 outlets, 15A) (link)

2. Extension Cable (25’) (link)

3. USB C to USB C (10’) (2x) (link)

4. USB-C Charger (65W) (2x) (link)

Pretty Simple

We get continuous power to the 2 FX3s via USB-C cables connecting to power bricks. Batteries stay inside the cameras in case the power goes out.

We have a power strip to power the monitor, the 2 lights, and sound mixer.

Safety & Set Management (shopping list)

shopping list

1. Sandbags (20lb) (8x) (link)

2. 18% Gray Card (link)

3. Spike Tape (link)

4. Hook & Loop Cable Ties (50x) (link)

5. Clapper Board (link)

Sandbag C-Stand Legs

For safety, we want to place at least 1 sandbag on the biggest leg of any C-stand (the side that is bearing weight). The “biggest” leg will be the one highest up in the “ring” of legs (you’ll know what I mean when you’re looking at the stand). This is most important for the backdrop & our big Aputure key light, those falling on anyone would be very bad!

By the way, here is how you use a C-stand.

Other Things

Gray card to set white balance, spike tape to mark positions of set items (for repeatable frames), slate to sync audio (or you can just clap your hands), and zipties to manage cables.

File Storage & Transfer (shopping list)

shopping list

1. Sandisk 2TB SSD (2x) (link)

2. LaCie 4TB (link)

3. Dropbox Plus (link)

4. Frame.io Pro (link)

5. optional

   1. Mac Mini M4 (link)

File Transfer (Streaming Proxies)

Finally, we come to file storage and transfer. Pretty simple. We will use Frame.io’s “Camera to Cloud” to stream low-resolution files (called “proxies”) straight off the cards (literally as we are recording) to our editor. By the time the shoot is over, they will have all the files they need to begin the edit. Editors work with proxies until a final conform step, where low-res files are swapped for full-res so that color-grading can be performed.

Full-Res Storage + Transfer

Someone in the studio will have to take the cards out of the camera and move the full-res files to the cloud. Dropbox can auto-watch a folder on the studio machine to auto-trigger cloud upload. The editor will download the full-res files from Dropbox.

Locally, we will make 2 copies of the footage onto SSDs. This is standard redundancy when taking footage off a set. The stakes are lower here and you can be less cautious if you’d like keeping only 1 copy.

SSDs are much faster than HDDs. You can use hard drives if you want; they are much cheaper.

Recap

So to recap:

• Proxies via C2C: Stream low-res files to Frame.io during the shoot — editor can start before you’ve packed up.

• Full-Res Offload: Cards pulled after the shoot, copied to 2 SSDs for local redundancy.

• Cloud Upload: Dropbox auto-watches the studio machine and uploads full-res files automatically.

• Final Conform: Editor swaps proxies for full-res masters from Dropbox before color grading.

The above minimizes time to first rough cut.

Network Attached Storage

At some point, you will outgrow using individual hard drives. You will want a NAS (Network Attached Storage) — a device that sits on your local network with multiple drives in a RAID configuration, automatically mirroring data so a single drive failure never costs you footage. Synology is the standard brand. I haven’t set one up myself yet, so when that day comes I’ll just watch a YouTube video or ask Claude what to do.

Studio Grand Total

So the total (on just equipment) is close to something like this:

1. Camera: $12,700

2. Monitoring: $1,900

3. Sound: $4,800

4. Lighting: $3,600

5. Backdrop: $500

6. Furniture: $500

7. Power: $100

8. Safety: $200

9. Accessories: $60

10. File Storage & Transfer: $1,600

Grand Total: ~$26,000

To put this into perspective, $26,000 is roughly what a single mid-level marketing hire will cost for 3 months — before benefits, equity, or ongoing salary. This studio produces content for years.

You can find ways to reduce costs, recheck the list, and remove what you don’t need.

After the Shoot

The above just covers production costs (there’s no pre-production since you’ll just walk in and shoot from a light script). For post-production, you need to budget for original score (or music libraries), dialog editing, sound mixing, color, graphics & motion, and subtitles / captions. Post-production is out of scope for this piece.

I’m planning to write a future piece, “Film Production for Founders: What It Costs,” that goes in-depth on what every piece of production costs for both the producer and the end-client. So you can know exactly what your producer is budgeting against.

Good Content ≠ PMF

This is sort of an obvious disclaimer, but if you’re pre-PMF, building a content studio shouldn’t be at the top of your list; it should be talking to customers. Good storytelling is important at any stage, but permanent infrastructure is a longer-term bet when there is a product worth telling a story about.

AI

Will AI replace the need to do all this to capture image and sound for something this simple? Yeah, probably. But the deeper you go into the stack of creative decision-making: cinematography, production design, writing, performance, score, color, editing rhythm — the more the combinatorics compound against getting a satisfactory result end-to-end.

Performances in physical space, with someone coaching you through how you come off in real-time, will also be hard to replace. But it’s precarious to be too sure about anything. For now, all you need to know is this is how you’d do it today, and this is what it would cost.

Go Build

So that’s it. If you’re a startup founder or venture fund that’s been considering building your own content studio, this is everything you need to consider or buy. It’s a deliberately simple setup. No complex considerations, no crew of 20, no Hollywood budget. All that’s necessary is a considered space, the right gear, and a commitment to show up consistently.

I’ll be working with 2 startups or venture firms to build their studios in Q2. Each build will be unique — I’ll work with a cinematographer and production designer for the initial build, then stay on as a creative lead for ongoing content. If you want to be one of them, DM @bephrem on X. If you’d rather build the studio yourself, everything you need is in this piece.

tl;dr: The Silicon Valley Film Fund is funding the next great cinematic works on the technology industry. Our first grant will be a $15,000 award to a filmmaker who wants to make a short film. The fund’s short-term goal is to jump-start a new film industry in San Francisco, its medium-term goal is to train a new generation of tech-native writers, directors, and producers, and its long-term goal is to shepherd a theatrically successful film into theaters. We have no portfolio. We have no agenda. Our agenda is the culture’s. Submission criteria can be found below. Submit your script to scripts@svfilm.fund. We will review every script.

We Need Better Stories

Silicon Valley tech is one of the most culturally dominant forces in the world. It has reshaped how humans work, communicate, relate to each other, and understand themselves. The founders, engineers, and builders of this world have changed civilization. And yet there is almost no serious cinema that comes from inside it.

Not caricature. Not satire. Not outsider reconstruction. Genuine interior cinema — stories told by people who lived inside the industry, built in it, and have been shaped by it. And the window to make it is open right now. AI has made building so accessible, and the industry’s implications so far-reaching and consequential, that those building now have the time, and are forced, to look up and ask: why are we building?

Here is the current film canon for the innovation industry:

cinema

• The Social Network (2010): 15 years old, zeitgeist story (Facebook), explores high-level themes of obsession, disconnection from reality, and betrayal. Shaped by David Fincher & Aaron Sorkin. Canonical cinema. This is the best portrait of startup life we have.

• Her (2013): Technology filling human voids. Isolation. A specific modern loneliness. Strong touchpoint, but ultimately observational.

• Steve Jobs (2015): Biopic. A single person and snapshot in time.

• BlackBerry (2023): The rise and fall of RIM. A portrait of founders and a company in real time. But, it’s a documented story working from a historical scaffold.

• Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999): A TV movie. Also on Steve Jobs & Bill Gates.

• Artificial (coming soon, 2026): Sam Altman’s 2023 ousting from OpenAI, another zeitgeist, point-in-time story.

• Jason Carman is working on a sci-fi trilogy (coming soon, 2026-2027)

documentary

• New Space (2025): Jason Carman’s first feature-length documentary.

• Too Cheap To Meter (2025): Jason Carman’s second feature-length documentary.

• General Magic (2018): Close to interiority. A retrospective.

• The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019): Theranos. Elizabeth Holmes. Observational.

• Lo and Behold (2016): Herzog treats Silicon Valley as an alien civilization to observe. Fascinating. Not interior.

• The Internet’s Own Boy (2014): Aaron Swartz. A martyr’s portrait. Not a world.

• Something Ventured (2011): Founders celebrating themselves. Hagiography dressed as history.

• The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (coming this month, March 2026): The inevitable “regular guy trying to figure out what is going on” documentary. From trailer, looks like it will be a balanced, high-level account. A handful of expert interviews, equal parts fear and equal parts optimism. A perspective that should exist. Still not from inside this world.

television

• Silicon Valley (2014–2019): Satire. Brilliant. Keeps the world at arm’s length by design.

• Halt and Catch Fire (2014–2017): Period reconstruction. 1980s tech. Interior but historical.

• WeCrashed / The Dropout / Super Pumped (2022): The scandal wave. Fraud as prestige TV.

• Black Mirror: Tech anxiety from the outside. British. Speculative.

• The Audacity (coming soon, April 2026): From the trailer looks like more outsider reconstruction with dramatic license.

Biopics about legends, documentaries about fraud, a TV movie, one Herzog oddity, a 15-year-old film made by two geniuses who weren’t from this world, and a timely AI documentary. Seven decades of building the most consequential technology in human history, and this is the only cinematic record that exists of this industry.

Compare this with the finance industry, just looking at cinema: Wall Street (1987), Rogue Trader (1999), Boiler Room (2000), Too Big to Fail (2011), Margin Call (2011), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Big Short (2015). A rich canon of seven films spanning four decades from multiple perspectives. Greed, collapse, moral compromise, human cost.

A thorough cinematic rendering of a world.

Why This Matters Now

Storytelling is the transmission of experience. Cinema defines collective memory. It is the only medium that can make you feel another person’s interior life in your body. It is the antidote to cultural misunderstanding. It is the ultimate unifier. Eras are processed & remembered through the films made about them.

We don’t need to make better films about ourselves in the same way that we don’t need great art. It’s not imperative to our life or death. To this working or that working. But the greatest works of film, the greatest works of art, make it hard to imagine life without them. And you only know after they exist.

When inside the tech Twitter bubble, it’s hard to see that we’re in an era worth documenting cinematically. A time-period where the work this geographic region produces is so consequential and widespread, that not taking agency over its authorship would be a mistake.

AI’s implications are becoming real. Block laid off nearly half its workforce — whether we know it or not, we are slowly entering into a class war. As a film producer, I work with artists (editors, cinematographers, composers, colorists, production crew). It is hard to appreciate, as someone in tech / on tech Twitter, how much artists hate AI. We’re entering one of the most culturally charged moments in tech history, without the ability to shape how this industry is understood. In fact, we’re structurally incapable of telling our own stories on film.

This is not a problem in an immediately apparent way, but more in a death by 1,000 cuts way. Culture operates in widespread, invisible, and impossible-to-measure ways. A Senate bill might get passed because a congressperson saw a film a decade ago that subconsciously influenced their vote. A venture capitalist might decide to fund a specific deeptech startup because they saw a Jason Carman documentary 2 years ago without recalling it.

Collective consciousness decides what is and isn’t possible. What is and isn’t true. It decides what this place is. We are currently not writing to it.

Interior Works

While writing this memo, I began to wonder if other points in history had felt like this, an artistic stagnation that led to a guy writing a memo and starting a movement. It turns out there are 2 similar movements: Italian Neorealism (1945-1952) and the French New Wave (late 1950s and 1960s), where François Truffaut actually wrote a critical memo before studying at Cinémathèque Française for 4 years before making The 400 Blows (1959). Let’s look at Italian Neorealism first.

Italian Neorealism (~1945-1952)

In 1945, Rome was in a state of rubble after WWII had ended. Germany occupied Italy for 2 years, and the fascist period — twenty years of Mussolini — had just collapsed. The city was physically destroyed. The economy was in ruins. Unemployment was catastrophic. And people were genuinely desperate in a way that’s hard to imagine — not inconvenienced, not struggling, existentially precarious. There were no resources and the studios were bombed or broke.

2 directors, Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, made films with the resources they had. Their cameras, the streets, and non-actors. Rossellini started the movement with Roma, Open City (1945) using whatever film stock he could find on the black market. It’s not a polished film. It couldn’t be — Rome’s studios were bombed and its entire production infrastructure had collapsed. It featured a cast primarily of non-actors, it featured city streets in rubble, capturing the environment as it existed. He filmed inside the world as it was happening.

Bicycle Thieves (1948) by Vittorio De Sica featured a cast of all non-actors. A man needed his bike to go to work every day and feed his family. It gets stolen and his whole livelihood is threatened. At the time, this would have been catastrophic. Losing your sole means of transportation meant losing your job. The bike represented the father’s dignity, livelihood, and ability to provide for his son. De Sica was offered Cary Grant (an international star) for the leading role of the father with full financing, but turned it down. Instead choosing Lamberto Maggiorani, a real factory worker who had never acted. Lamberto went on to put on a surprisingly and totally actor-like performance as the Dad desperately looking for the bike. It didn’t look like acting because it wasn’t. He was that man.

Bicycle Thieves is a perfect example of a culturally interior work with authenticity that could not have been faked or researched. Rome in poverty, non-actors, a desperate time. Nothing was imagined with cinematic license. It was all real. And a simple story of a man searching for a bike with his son, shot with simple visual grammar, told you everything about what that time and what those people were going through. De Sica knew this world from living inside it.

French New Wave (late 1950s and 1960s)

François Truffaut, a film critic, observed that French cinema at the time had an inert, literary quality (he called it a “Tradition of Quality”). It featured prestige adaptations of classic novels by craftsmen who were following rules established by their predecessors. In 1954 he wrote “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”, an indictment naming names, attacking the French film industry. He believed that the director’s personality and worldview should be visible in and inseparable from the work itself. And he believed the films that needed to be made, weren’t being made.

His manifesto would seed the French New Wave movement and solidify auteur theory. Truffaut wrote the memo before any of the films existed. The films followed. 4 years later he would make The 400 Blows (1959) after years of obsessive film study at the Cinémathèque Française (the Paris film archive where you could watch films all day every day for almost nothing), while working as a film critic. The 400 Blows was semi-autobiographical — the main character Antoine Doinel was essentially Truffaut as a boy. Neglected by his parents, in trouble with authorities, finding freedom only in cinema and in running. Deeply personal to the point of exposure. It premiered at Cannes 1959. Won Best Director. Truffaut was 27.

3 Takeaways

(1) A Moment of Cultural Intensity: The common thread between neorealism and the New Wave is that they both arose from moments of cultural intensity that necessitated their existence. Both were made by people so inside the world that the camera had no distance from it.

(2) Thesis First vs Films First: Rossellini (who made “Rome, Open City”) just picked up a camera and filmed the world outside. Truffaut wrote a manifesto before the films came. Different approaches, same result.

(3) Interior Truth: Both movements asked the same question: who gets to tell the truth about this world, and what happens when nobody does? They were started by people who refused to accept that the stories that needed to exist weren’t being made. Neither waited for permission or resources. The absence was unacceptable to them. That’s why this fund exists.

What Current Tech Cinema Doesn’t Answer

The Social Network (2010) is the closest example to a deep interrogation of founder psychology we have. But it’s on one person, a 2003 Mark Zuckerberg, made into mythology. What it does well is capture a person before scale, but it’s just 1 portrait.

Here are characters that have yet to be sufficiently explored:

Here are characters that have yet to be sufficiently explored:

• early-stage founders

• early-stage employees

• late-stage founders

• late-stage employees

• partners to founders / employees

• venture capitalists

• researchers, scientists

• creatives in tech

• those unemployed (and the culture supporting exploration)

• regular residents of San Francisco (and their relation to people in tech)

• the person off tech Twitter with 200 followers that tweets insanely accurate takes from a Victorian in Lower Haight that gets 50 views but is usually right

• permutations of the above that doesn’t fit a specific mold (the above are very linear archetypes)

Here are questions that have yet to be sufficiently explored:

• what does loneliness in this world look like? what are people here really like? what does it look like to go from a nobody to somebody here?

• what does delusional self-belief look like? in its most positive form? in its worst form? what level of faith and foresight does it take to build something new? what are the consequences taken to its extreme end?

• what does love look like? romantic relationships between founders, employees, or others not in tech? what are the tensions? desires unable to be met?

• what does greed look like? optimizing for TC at the expense of everything else? where does that work? where does it fail? what does the striving look like?

• what does the social scene look like? how do tech people interact with the physical city they are in? what does tech twitter as the primary communication model look like?

• how do people talk? what does being terminally online really look like? what does functional autism look like? how do people walk and carry themselves? what do they avoid doing? what are they drawn to?

• what does overoptimization look like? neuroticism beyond reason? a singular focus that is confusing and unreasonable to onlookers.

• what does sacrifice look like? not abstractly. in a body. in a marriage. in friendship. what does growing through that look like?

• what does it feel like to build something that becomes something you didn’t intend? to watch the thing you made with genuine idealism cause harm at scale? and deciding who you are in relation to that.

• what does a high-growth startup look like? what are the ramifications on psychology?

• what does leaving the industry feel like? the engineer who walks away from salary, mission, identity, and has to reconstruct themselves outside the only world that ever made complete sense.

• who are these people really? not the myth. not the caricature. the actual human beings underneath.

None of this exists cinematically. That’s what we exist to fund.

What We’re Looking For

A script for a short film, 15-20 minutes long.

The criterion is not a résumé. Not a zip code. Not a job title. It is interiority. A relationship to this world that got into you before you knew it would matter.

You don’t need to have been a founder or an engineer. You just need to know this world from the inside — its specific people, values, contradictions, and way of being. The script will know if you do. The details that are too specific to have been invented. The silences that assume shared knowledge. The things that are in the script because they had to be — not because they were written but because they were lived.

You might be a director already producing commercial work for startups. Or a freelance videographer in San Francisco. You might be a founder who moved away. An engineer who writes screenplays and studies film as a hobby. A producer from LA who moved here and is figuring out the cultural landscape you now work in. There is no exact shape to who the recipient of this grant could be.

We’re uninterested in funding outsider interpretations. Dramatic work written from guesses or “wouldn’t that one line be funny.” Hacker thrillers. Cautionary tales on social media. If you have to make anything up, related to the core characters and story, without it being grounded in true life experience and observation, we are uninterested. Please do not submit your script.

Good scripts will/may have:

• details that are too specific to have been invented

• scenes included because they really happened, rather than just being dramatically effective

• characters only people in tech would recognize immediately

• locations that are too specific to the world that they had to have come from lived memory

• some core unresolved question the filmmaker wants to answer

• interior stakes that are too specific to have been invented

• dialog rhythm that is too specific to have been invented, it had to have been heard

• basically, a lot of things that are too specific to have been invented

If you have a script like this, we want to read it.

The Fund

Creative talent with the interiority to tell these stories exists, but no capital structure, void of private interest, has formed around them to take their craft and the stories they hold in their heads seriously. To take storytelling as a career seriously.

This fund is that missing structure. To greenlight stories that need to get made right now. To create structure around what is right now a nascent commercial filmmaking scene.

We are not a startup with a product we need to market. We are not a venture capital firm. We have no portfolio. We have no favorites. Having a product is fine. Having a portfolio is fine. But because all of these interests rarely align in the best interest of broader culture, a neutral institution needs to exist.

We simply look at gaps in the technology industry’s storytelling, and aim to fill them with truth. That’s it.

The Grant

$15,000. Awarded to 1 filmmaker to make 1 short film.

on budget

You don’t need a big budget when you have something true to say, and the craft to say it well. Medicine for Melancholy (2008) was made by Barry Jenkins on $15k (~23k today). 2 characters, handheld, San Francisco as backdrop. Through the rawness of the performances, you could still sense something very true being said, and you could clearly sense an early & powerful directorial voice in his shot grammar. Constraint can create great things.

Submission

You know if this is you. You’ve known since the first paragraph. You have a story that couldn’t have been written by anyone else. We’re building this fund for you.

Send your script to scripts@svfilm.fund. I will review every script submitted.

on submitting

Include (1) your script as a PDF, (2) a short note on who you are and why you’re the one to tell this story — one paragraph, no formal cover letter needed — and (3) any previous work if it exists. Previous work is optional. The script and the note are not.

Submissions close June 10. I will read every script. I can’t reply to every submission, but if your script is the one, you’ll hear from me. All submissions are subject to a standard submission release agreement, which you’ll complete before I read your script.

At the start of this year (February), I decided to get serious about my interest in film. I’ve always been interested in cameras and media, but coming from a lifelong background in engineering, I never really saw it as a viable career path.

Story Company launched in early February, and a media frenzy ensued. Every startup and venture capital firm began to question their media strategy on X & LinkedIn (if it even existed). Video content began to flood the X timeline.

In April, Cluely released their viral launch video, earning 13M+ impressions on X. The frenzy furthered. The X timeline began to fill with poorly lit venture capital podcasts, 1m10s clips, emotionally distant talking-head announcements, and even more launch videos.

The production swell continued until roughly August, by which time launch video quality had significantly declined (and marketing budgets for experimentation dissipated).

At the start of 2025, I predicted a renaissance in film and the arts, but all San Francisco (the innovation center of the world) got was viral launch videos and podcasts.

Moving to San Francisco

I moved to San Francisco in September 2023. I was working on a voice-AI-enabled platform for software engineers to live-practice interviews with AI interviewers. It was the natural extension to the course company I was running at the time, called “Interview Pen” (a clone of my previous company, “Back To Back SWE” which I exited prematurely).

After arriving in SF, I unrolled my $99 foam mattress from Amazon in the corner of my co-founder’s studio apartment in the Marina. I was excited to stay lean and build the product out.

Little did I foresee, 2 guys living on the floor in a studio apartment together, one full-time on the product and another part-time, turned out to be a problem.

Aside from the expected squabbles about living situation, my co-founder had a very high revenue expectation for the company ($40,000/mo+) before he would consider going full-time. Or, he stipulated, we had to get into Y Combinator.

Eventually, I got kicked out. I ended up moving 2 more times that Fall and Winter within the city. Spending 1 month in SoMA, 1 month in Lower Haight.

In the midst of this chaos, I started seeing some videos popping up on Twitter & YouTube from Jason Carman. At the time, video was only a hobby for me; throughout 2023, I was filming vertical shorts, trying to make them cinematic.

I reached out to Jason over DMs and actually ended up as a camera operator on this tweet.

Saturday Startup Stories

Jason Carman single-handedly carried visual storytelling in Silicon Valley from late ’23 to mid ’25, documenting the AI boom as it happened with his series “Saturday Startup Stories,” which featured a new deeptech startup every week.

I didn’t realize how insane a production cycle this was until I began attempting to produce work in February. To publish weekly, you have to be in all 3 production stages at once, at all times:

1. Development/Pre-production: Have a new story located or being researched.

2. Production: Filming the same day another episode is published.

3. Post-Production: Editing next week’s episode.

Maintaining the quality bar S3 had at this speed, while holding full-time work, is commendable (made more possible by Jason’s background as an editor).

The Cultural Core

Throughout this time period, all the way up to Story Company’s launch at the beginning of this year, no one was doing film in Silicon Valley in a big and serious way. It really was just 1 guy vs. the world.

Various YouTube influencers were touching here and there, but very few at the heart of innovation as it was happening, the cultural core of who was doing it and what this place is about.

Throughout 2024, I began to ask myself why this was the case. At the time, I was recovering from my co-founder leaving in January, faltered around in the Spring, before joining The San Francisco Compute Company as a Product Engineer in June.

So much was happening, but why were so few people filming it?

New Media

Jason’s work was the seed for more serious media operations to emerge in a culture that has historically denied image:

• News: TBPN (Oct ’24, John going full-time Apr ’25)

• Print: Arena Magazine (Aug ’24)

• In-House: A16Z New Media (Apr ’25)

• Personality: Ashlee Vance/Core Memory (Jan ’25)

• Podcast: Sourcery (Feb ’24)

“New Media” has always been a funny word to me because it’s just…regular media. We just didn’t publish our own narrative until ’24/’25. Most people in tech (including me) didn’t even know that narrative was deliberately created. It turns out there is a whole industry & city dedicated to only this.

Summer 2025

Between February and June, I was stumbling through documentary attempts and interviews, feeling and discovering my way through every aspect of filmmaking from first principles.

Why didn’t you like the video? The images are nice.. Story structure? Oh, what is that? Ah, screenwriting. Why does the image on that camera look washed out, and the other look crisp? Ah, cinematography? Logistics are a mess and I’m moving too slow. Ah, producing. The clip-on mic doesn’t sound as great as the overhead boom…where do I place it again? Ah, sound. I keep using music libraries and it doesn’t really fit the shape of the video. Ah, score composition. I keep visiting offices, moving plants around, but it never looks quite right. Ah, production design. One person coordinates all of these disciplines? Ah, directing.

Oh, there’s a whole school for this? Film school.

Lighthouse

In May, I began a documentary for Lighthouse (they help workers secure skilled immigration visas, like the O1). I had a general idea of what I wanted to do:

• cut together multiple customer interviews

• anchored by Minn’s personal narrative

• with supplemental commentary from employees on their personal journey getting visas

But I didn’t really understand what I was doing. The overall message, structure, & direction of the work.

I conducted 6 interviews, where each interviewee thought they were giving a testimonial for Lighthouse. But walking in, I wanted to go deeper and explore a narrative of personal struggle, the real truth of the subject (which is just challenging and legally touchy to talk about, especially when in a position of power, talking to someone you just met, when you don’t know where the final video will go).

So the interviews captured watered-down replies, not really going anywhere, not really saying anything.

In the edit, I realized how clueless I was. Piecing together a narrative that I didn’t know, over poorly directed interviews that didn’t have the informational or emotional content I needed to make the video work (and I was doing everything myself: the producing, cinematography, sound, directing, editing — for free).

And after 8 production days and 1 ½ weeks of editing, the project was impossible to complete.

Film School

At this point (roughly in May), I realized I needed to actually know what I was doing. I resolved that I’d learn everything about every subject that touched the medium. So I started reading…

Cinematography, writing, directing, producing, production design, editing. I wanted to learn everything so my inability to “do the thing” would go away. After the Lighthouse shoot I read a whole textbook on directing.

I began watching 4 films a week, covering almost 80+ films since late April. Internalizing story structure, shot grammar, cinematography principles, etc…

I didn’t realize it, but I was back in school again—this time as a first-year film student.

Offscript

Around May & June, I felt a vacuum start to form on the X timeline. Tech Twitter begins to circle certain keywords for 2-3 weeks spans, and the keyword at this time was “storytelling”. No one knew how to do it, or what it really meant. Narrative pressure was building.

One day I saw the post I was waiting for, from Juliana announcing Offscript, which went viral. Offscript’s team composition fits the perfect (only) shape that will work for commercial film production in Silicon Valley:

• Juliana: Bridges the creative and technical world. As a former software engineer at Google + formal MFA in film. Can chop it up with people on tech Twitter. Can think both in impressions + reach + long-term signal, and artistic + aesthetic terms. Without both, everything falls apart.

• Alli: Comes completely from the creative world. Providing creative direction and institutional production power.

• Cam: Silicon Valley moves much faster than the normal production world. Productions need to turn around in days to a week to keep up with tech Twitter. Cameron comes from a rigorous post-production background.

It felt like a mathematician seeing a theorem they’d long suspected finally proven. That’s the only way it could have worked.

It was clear to me that Offscript could not have emerged from within SF, and it deepened my curiosity on why that was the case.

Barriers to a Storytelling Industry

The backstory above sets the context for what it looks like for a lifetime software engineer (with a recently acknowledged strong interest in film) to attempt this rare career switch.

Since February, I’ve kept an Apple Note listing the challenges I’ve faced and how they might generalize to why Silicon Valley’s stories, the ones at the core, have been largely absent from the audio-visual medium.

These will read as a quick list with a conclusion at the end.

#1 — Education

A film education is as extensive as an engineering one. I went through 4 years of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. It involved extensive readings, practice, and hands-on projects.

A film education is no less rigorous. Film students go through a curriculum of 250-400 films over 4 years, getting hands-on experience collaborating with every department on full narrative sets, shooting student films, building countless relationships to specialties the craft requires.

Film as a medium is just as complex and demanding to have control over as the hardest programming assignment I ever did while in school. The complexity is just pushed to different problems (people, organizing ideas, logistical uncertainty, noticing what isn’t there in a performance that should be).

Those who study Film rarely pursue a dual major in Computer Science. Those who study Computer Science rarely pursue a dual major in Film. One is a field of the mind, the other, the heart.

#2 — Exposure

To progress in directing (& producing), you have to have mass exposure to every kind of audio-visual content. Feature films, documentaries, television, commercial spots, YouTube videos (Internet), etc.

This allows you to subconsciously absorb visual grammar (how a visual story converts to meaning, with what efficiency, pacing, rhythm, emotional texture), and build a mental library of preferences you can articulate in your own work.

People in tech (until culture has shifted in the past 1-2 years) don’t watch movies. They don’t watch TV. They’re building products heads-down, 9-9-6. There are many exceptions, but on average, your best backend engineer isn’t caught up with the latest show on HBO Max.

It’s only this year that I’ve started to study feature films, and I have a backlog of 500 films to study.

Studying feature films has been massively helpful for me to internalize visual storytelling. Showing, not telling. Writing with images.

Competence in the medium comes from exposure, which career engineers do not have.

#3 — Thinking vs. Feeling

Narrative film is about emotion delivery and creating change in the viewer. Software engineering is about critical thinking and system correctness + reliability. These are polar-opposite skillsets, attracting very different personality types to either profession.

Film favors the outgoing and personable, software favors the overly cerebral and pensive. Film is based on intuition and feeling; software is based on raw intellect and knowing.

Much of film work is based on not knowing, and instead finding. Almost every interview shoot I’ve walked out of where I “knew I got it” turned out to be an emotionally inert flop; those that I thought were a mess and unsalvageable often turn out to somehow work.

I’ve watched the movie Sinners 30+ times in theaters. Every time, before the show begins, I look around at the people behind and in front of me to collect an image of their emotional journey I can see as the film plays. I contemplate why we’re all there. Why do we pay $10-20 to sit in a dark room, staring at a large screen of moving images?

It is to experience emotional satisfaction. A beginning, middle, and end—that connects to a meaning.

Whether it be emotional catharsis, watching a horror movie, or finding true love, watching a romance. The product is invisible, existing only in viewers’ minds. Like a distributed database of emotional values. Your career as a director advances when you move as many of those distributed values in any desired direction.

On the other hand, startups are about creating tangible products. Those users can interact with and gain value from. Whether software UI or hardware, effort can go into seeing a tangible result.

The result of a film is intangible. You can never touch or see culture. You just feel its shape from your set of experiences with the world.

#4 — Talent Density

World-class technical talent moves to San Francisco to work at or build companies. World-class creative talent moves to LA or NYC to work at the highest level for their specific medium (in film, this is narrative features/commercial work/documentaries).

Any given film work, even a simple talking-head announcement, may touch 6+ creative specialties:

• production

  • directing (observing and managing performance)

  • cinematographer (will handle both camera & lighting)

  • sound recordist

• post-production

  • editor

  • colorist

  • graphics (design + motion)

The density of creative talent for any given discipline you’re hiring for will be a harder search here in San Francisco. Most creative talent physically isn’t here. The best are booked out 1 month. Some of the best cinematographers in the Bay might find themselves in the middle of the pack in strong talent markets like LA or NYC.

The best talent moves to where the best talent is. Where the opportunity to go as high as possible in your career is. And for creative people, that is (currently) not San Francisco.

This creates a vicious cycle. Without concentrated talent, standards stagnate. Without rising standards, there’s no visible career path. Without a career path, talent leaves—and the loop tightens.

Jenny Gao’s timely “50,000 Art Hoes Will Save San Francisco” talk playfully gave a nod to this serious labor shortage. (apparently the talk wasn’t filmed in San Francisco, rather, Sydney, Australia)

#5 — Collaboration

Film is a highly collaborative medium. It involves communication between many parties: subjects, clients, vendors, locations, crew, and your own creative staff. You have to talk to a lot of people. You must develop strong interpersonal skills.

Most people in tech (and San Francisco) are introverts. They can start beef on Twitter, but not go outside for 2 days. The city attracts those who were quiet or outcasts in some way early in life, and who are now on a revenge arc (which manifests as company-building).

A majority of software work can be completed individually (with more or less cross-functional collaboration required, depending on org and project size). An engineer can code up a backend endpoint, deploy, and it can stay operational for 4+ years—without talking to anyone.

Film work is a process of constant handoffs and clarifications. From project inception to completion, a never-ending alignment between stakeholders and creative staff. Being a clear communicator is a requirement.

This makes film talent less likely to emerge from those who naturally gravitate to San Francisco for a tech career.

#6 — Visibility

Film is a very visible medium. People bet on people, names they trust. Trust comes from the belief that someone can survive 10,000+ creative decisions and still get it right. So name & face become as much the product as the product itself.

Chain of Visibility: Actors are the most visible, since they are on-screen. Directors are visible as the creative authors of the work. Producers are visible for making the thing happen (except more in industry circles than general public awareness). Almost every other role: cinematographer, composer, etc. also maintain industry visibility.

Visibility is how you survive. It’s how producers get sent projects to produce. It’s how directors get projects to direct. It’s how composers get projects to compose. The industry runs on being seen—being easy to locate & say “yes” to.

Software engineers like to be invisible. They leave their GitHub avatars unset. They set their Twitter avatars to an abstract gradient. Say the most with the fewest words. Efficiency. Economy. In an ideal world, they want to make $500k+ TC with no one knowing their name. Why would you need to know my name?

Striving to be visible signals incompetence; the best produce the most while being completely invisible. Being invisible is high status.

This cultural attitude, this survival mechanism—having been ingrained across a lifetime, is almost impossible to unlearn.

#7 — Income

Software engineers make a lot of money. Over $200,000/yr for good roles, up to $500,000/yr+ into senior roles. Your first year as an independent director, you might be lucky to take home $20,000 (a 10x decrease)—after living expenses, investing in gear, building a portfolio of work, investing time learning, etc.

Throughout the year, I would help Sonith (from ZFellows) and 50y film their podcast + a mess of other freelance work. This allowed me to just get by and spend time studying and developing my own projects.

Arlan

By late July, I realized I wasn’t being intentional about the projects I was taking on. So I decided to produce a proper interview with an actual set to show I was capable of working with a crew.

I had a concept for an infinite white room I’ve wanted to do for a while. I knew the project would take some investment so I waited for the right person to do it with. Eventually I stumbled across Arlan (from Nia) on my timeline. I DM’d him.

In August, I produced the project, assembling the crew and going way over budget.

It cost ~$6,000 to produce. Just a simple infinite white room concept. Film production is more expensive (and inefficient) than most people in tech realize.

The below is a breakdown:

Across the final full interview (61k+ impressions) + 4 clips (124k, 30k, 14k, 1k…) the content earned over 230k+ impressions. At $15 CPM (not sure on Twitter’s exact pricing), a ~$3,500 return in earned attention. So not that terrible. I wasn’t producing this for the reach, it was a portfolio item to show I could think cinematically & direct a crew.

Leaving a high-paying, predictable, stable career for a capital-intensive, emotionally intensive, unstable career you’re not even good at yet—doesn’t make much logical sense for anyone with a strong tech career.

It especially doesn’t make sense during one of the greatest wealth creation events in technology history (’22-’25).

I’m ending the year still barely getting by in income (mostly because I hadn’t decided to commit to the career until a month ago and kept turning down paying projects).

#8 — Switching Costs (Skill)

I started programming when I was 16. I wrote Android apps for my Samsung Galaxy Note 4. I remember the first time I ran Android Studio, and a blank screen with “Hello World” text in the center popped up. It was magic.

During high school, I would take lessons on Treehouse, learning JavaScript, C#, Java, frontend frameworks, backend—I wanted to know everything.

Most programmers spend years honing their taste in code and patterns through self-education, projects at work, and code review. An eye for good code takes at least 4+ years to develop. Frameworks and languages can take 6+ months to pick up and become professionally proficient in.

Switching to film, you throw all of that specialized knowledge away. None of it matters. It’s a completely different set of skillsets (most interpersonal), in a completely different medium, with completely different goals.

I’ve “thrown” a decade of specialized knowledge away in full-stack engineering. From 16 to 26. “Thrown away” a 4-year Computer Science degree that defined who I was.

It’s been a challenge for me to write screenplays in plain English after spending half a lifetime in VSCode/Cursor. I always feel the pull to open an IDE…so I can feel immediately “useful” again. To feel that sense of control from running a program, it not working, fixing it, then running again.

What’s helped me is realizing that in film, the same architectural rigor exists, except in a different way. Instead of software architecture & abstractions, you have story architecture & dramatic beats. The architecture is emotional and event-based rather than in code.

#9 — Learning Curve

Beyond a formal film education being very helpful, much of film work can only be learned through hands-on experience. Working with documentary subjects from behind the camera or narrative actors on a set. Trying—seeing what works and what doesn’t in the edit. What wasn’t there that we want? What was there? Over and over again.

Technology workers do not have this required experience. You have to do the thing to get it. But you won’t be doing the thing if your career is not in…the thing.

Since February, I’ve grappled to understand story structure. In March, I thought I had it, but I didn’t. In May, I thought I had it, but I didn’t. In November…

Only 9 months later, after extensive study and painful learning experiences, do I feel I have a strong, intuitive grasp of dramatic structure (at least at a 2nd-3rd year film school student level). I can look for it and see it in any narrative work. I can sense emotional texture—where it sits, where it should sit.

This intuitive nature to film takes a decade+ to develop a sense for at a subconscious level.

#10 — Identity

To switch from a technical career to a creative career, you have to undergo an ego death. You have to shift both your internal perception of who you are, as well as your external brand of who others believe you to be professionally. This can take years.

Technical peers look at creative pursuits with skepticism. There is a “waiting to see if they make it” dynamic always at play.

I’ve watched my previous network of technical peers stop texting me, stop reaching out for coffee chats. There is just not much of an overlap anymore to maintain constant communication. Our paths do not intersect to an extent where value exchange can go both ways.

What I’ve found is that the network just turns into creative people. Writers, editors, cinematographers, other directors. But that transition is a painful and lonely one.

This happens simultaneously to the period of time when you aren’t yet great at the thing (and financially struggling). To become great, you have to publish publicly while still an amateur. You have to embarrass yourself to progress.

A software engineer always has to be aware of the tools they have to solve a particular problem. New tools come out every month, you try them on the weekend, tinker, test, and tweet about it. It’s how you progress in your career, stay relevant, and survive.

I had to become OK with not being on that cutting-edge anymore. Not knowing the newest database or agent framework. This was especially difficult during ’23-’25 when so much was happening in software. I can still understand concepts—I’m just not embedded in the world day-to-day. It is impractical and impossible to do so as a filmmaker. You have 100 years of cinema to catch up on…

This is something I’m still not totally over.

#11 — Builder Culture

Until 23/’24, the culture of San Francisco was a “shut up and build” culture. If you were talking, if you were public with your image, you must not be building anything that important. Being visible and perceived as vain meant career death.

With AI making the building of many mid-tier consumer software products accessible, the challenge shifted to distribution. Getting people to know about the thing. Why the thing matters. Storytelling.

A whole industry realized a massive surface area of attention they were ignoring (X & LinkedIn). 1m10s podcast clips were getting 300k+ impressions on X (300 * $15 CPM → $4,500 in raw attention sitting on the table if you take 20 minutes to edit out a clip).

This happened in parallel to Jason Carman ripping a documentary a week. People in technology began to see the value in seeing your culture accurately represented in media. The value of scaling image.

Every cultural movement is a time that comes and passes. Sometimes it just isn’t the right time for a certain idea, or movement, or work of art. This was Silicon Valley pre-2023.

A cultural window is opening.

#12 — Industry Awareness

I’ve never been to LA. Until February of this year, I wasn’t even exactly sure what Hollywood did. I watched movies as a kid, but I never contemplated further to seeing myself having a career in film.

2 major industries, the entertainment and technology industry, the former valued at $2-3T, the latter $5-8T (thanks Claude), are almost completely unaware of how the other works.

And they aren’t really interested in figuring it out, either. For creative work, humans are at the heart of the work. For technical work, technology and systems are at the heart of the work. The best creatives are (usually) the least technical, the best technical talent is (usually) not the most creative.

Silicon Valley is insular in culture. Founders talk to each other in “group chats” (I’m apparently not in any of them..), 1 Twitter post can take over the narrative of a whole industry for the day, <100-1,000 accounts set the agenda for 500k-1M+ onlookers. We don’t watch the Super Bowl.

We’ve traditionally been culturally tone-deaf and closed off.

On the other hand, entertainment is all about culture. Its creation, transformation, death, rebirth.

#13 — Access

Filmmaking runs on access and trust. You can only tell stories with people whom you have access to, and who trust you enough to step in front of your camera.

When someone wants to do content work, they will ping their network and go with the closest, safest bet. Other engineers, founders, investors—who have an interest in media. But not filmmakers. Filmmakers are not in the network. Local agencies and freelancers can do the work, but they’re not technologists.

Because of this, some of the best visual artists in the world are unable to access Silicon Valley’s stories. It’s both a network and communication problem—visual artists aren’t in-network, and most don’t have the chops to go back-and-forth on both strategy and artistic concerns.

The best artists live in a world of feeling that isn’t grounded in pushing metrics or business results. You can’t put up a job listing for “storyteller” and expect the applicants to be good; you have to identify and mobilize visual arts talent behind a fresh narrative they own.

To tell Silicon Valley’s stories, you have to become an insider.

#14 — Running a Production Cycle

To create a culturally significant media operation, you need to create a production machine. This can look like (1) timeline takeover, posting multiple times a day: clips, longform, live (like TBPN), or (2) infrequent & value-dense, releasing 1 magazine a quarter (like Arena Magazine).

In either case, you must be consistent in the release cadence your medium requires of you (while maintaining tone and quality), and the production operation must be designed to run forever (while adapting to culture).

Prospective media operators in SF do not know how to run a rigorous and logistically intense production operation. This talent exists in LA and NYC.

This creates the grand irony of TBPN being based in LA instead of San Francisco.

#15 — Motivating Creative Talent

Motivating creative talent is different from motivating engineering talent. (The best) creatives care about:

• constantly going deeper on their craft

• doing culturally important work

• seeing alignment between the director/founder and the story

• feeling the director/founder understands the technicalities of their craft

• fair pay, a respectable living

• loving who they work with

• surprising themselves (and others) with what they make

Engineers care about similar things, but creatives are much more focused on skill & process as output, over clean-cut salary, stock package, and bonus compensation. World-class creatives don’t really care about that; they’re obsessively craft-focused.

An engineer can not care about the company, make $500k TC, and go home feeling fulfilled. No matter how much you pay a creative, if they aren’t connected to the work, pushing the boundaries of their skills, pushing their understanding of their medium, great work won’t happen.

I always make it a point to study all of a creative’s work before meeting with them, so I can articulate back to them exactly what I find interesting or applicable to a project. If it’s a cinematographer, I’m watching every second of footage on their Instagram and website, looking for colors they like, themes, moods they gravitate to, etc.

#16 — Unemployment

Creative work is project-based. Very talented people can go weeks without work—not because they’re struggling, but because that’s simply how opportunities flow. Dry spells are built into the career.

In technology, unemployment puts you at zero status. You’re overlooked after introductions at parties, your friend group stays casually aware of it, companies become reluctant to hire the person someone else hasn’t hired. (unless, of course, you were just building your own startup all along…)

When you can attach your identity to a powerful company, you become someone in the ecosystem. You have leverage: relationships & information. You can get someone else a job, share hard-earned lessons from work on Twitter, angel invest in others with your income. You can give people something.

A creative between projects finds no social place in tech. They don’t have a “prev. OpenAI, Stripe, Uber” to connect in conversations. Their skills get overlooked, they can’t find many peers to lean on, and the housing gets too expensive.

So they leave.

Initiatives like “The Intersection of Art and Technology”, TIAT are safe 3rd places for creatives in tech. We need more of them.

#17 — Drama

Story comes from drama. Characters collide with reality and make critical choices that define who they are. The quality of a film is directly tied to how vulnerable, real, and open people can make themselves.

There are varying degrees of drama, from bickering with your roommate over food they stole from your side of the fridge—to a sprawling downtown shootout in LA involving dozens of cops, people falling left and right.

In either case, the drama is rooted in true events and not fabricated. Fabricated drama creates false meaning; it creates nothing.

Many founders and investors are not ready for the level of vulnerability the best storytelling requires. Revealing struggle publicly makes you weak—a target. When in reality, vulnerability and relatability are core to the empathy mechanism that makes film work—letting others see themselves in you and your story.

So some of the best stories still stay hidden, and much emotional landscape has been totally unexplored.

#18 — Dreams

The dream people move to San Francisco with: build a high-growth startup that gets millions of users, earn respect among industry peers, and make a lot of money.

The dream people move to Hollywood with: direct, produce, star in a feature film that has widespread cultural influence and impact. Maybe get famous. Also make a lot of money.

Filmmakers want to make films. Founders want to build a product.

A film studio is not a startup. Startups grow fast. Film studios, unless they take on capital or quickly create original IP, do not. They are service businesses.

Top startup talent is not interested in creating a service business. They want to swing for the fences. Top creative talent is not interested in a high-growth venture; they want to produce the best art.

Two opposite motivations.

#19 — Platform Gap

The world’s greatest visual storytelling talent is on Instagram or YouTube. Sometimes, with a presence on X. Some aren’t even online in any capacity.

The technology industry is on X.

A composer friend who scored 2 of my (very early) documentaries—I met at San Francisco’s first 222.place event doesn’t have any social media except LinkedIn (which he doesn’t maintain).

Talent doesn’t even get to see the opportunities for storytelling here—because they just aren’t on X.

#20 — Cinema vs. Socials

The “laws of gravity” for attention in cinema vs. Instagram vs. Twitter are completely different. In cinema, you have your audience captive for 2h10m. You get them through the door with a compelling premise, but once they’re in their seat, they have 1 choice for what they can watch.

In a theater, you can spend time building long character arcs, write drawn-out dialogue exchanges, build suspense with score and silence. The watcher is glued to their chair; nothing is competing for their attention in a totally dark room.

Twitter and Instagram have completely different rules. We’ll focus on Twitter:

• Default Muted: Videos are muted by default; you have to lean into visual storytelling in the first 4 seconds to get someone to stay & unmute. Clearly seeing the face of someone talking to you vs. abstract visuals will outperform.

• Contrast: Quick cutting visuals, movement, & color contrast stand out on the timeline. Many Twitter users in tech watch in dark mode. Posting a white GIF or video in a bright white room increases the contrast of your video against other content competing for attention.

• 24s-1m30s Video Length: Drop-off on a Twitter video can be 60%+ of watchers after 20s. Clips under 1m30s with a story arc see the most engagement. Information-driven content can budget 30s-1m for maximum engagement. Anything longer and shareability drops off steeply. Viewers will need more context or pre-existing trust that the content is worth their time.

• Emotion Above Everything: Making watchers feel something is all that matters. High production value is downstream of triggering a feeling of presence and immediacy. “This must be important.” Changing emotional charge every 10-15s. A video recorded on an iPhone can outperform a $100k+ commercial if its emotional architecture is stronger.

Many classically educated visual storytellers won’t have hands-on experience with platform idiosyncrasies.

The best tweets are immediate to comprehend. One morning I saw a podcast from Anthropic and decided to scribble a few slides breaking down the cinematography. It took me maybe 20 minutes. The post went (semi-)viral. It was well-timed, 1 sentence, 4 skimmable photos, and information-dense. You could comprehend the message in <10s. 221k impressions * $15 CPM = ~$3,300 in earned attention, just from 1 sentence and 4 scribbled slides.

You can spend 2 weeks, and thousands of dollars, making a documentary and it could only hit 5k in reach on Twitter. Socials don’t reward cinematic craft, they reward engagement. The craft has to be re-engineered to fit the physics of the platform.

#21 — Speed

Film and technology move at 2 different paces. News on X changes daily. Anyone can launch any day and reach everyone. Competitive landscapes are reshaped every week. You have to move fast.

Traditional film moves as fast as it can, but not at startup speed. A director may research a feature film for 2-3 years. Some scripts stay in development hell for a decade. The average time for production of a feature film from concept to screen is 2-5 years. Crews need to be booked 2-3 weeks in advance, sometimes months.

Truly great stories transcend time. They explore deeper, human-centered themes with no expiration date. The films that stick are replayed in theaters forever.

Some anniversaries I watched this year in theaters:
— 50th: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
— 50th: Jaws
— 41st: This Is Spinal Tap
— 40th: Back to the Future
— 40th: The Breakfast Club
— 30th: Apollo 13
— 15th: Black Swan

Startups have an expiration date; it’s always around the corner. They’re default dead.

They can’t afford a 3-month production cycle for a brand documentary. So the types of productions that make sense for startups are more limited, and need to stay lean and move 2x as fast.

The medium rewards craft, perfecting every detail in the image (costume, production design, lighting). This is how artists move forward in their careers and get respect from their peers.

Startups don’t have time for that.

#22 — Showing vs Telling

Cinematic storytelling is all about showing, not telling. Technology Twitter rewards long, cerebral rants (like this Substack post) that dive deep into a train of thought through written language. The visual medium rewards you when you deliver images and create watchable results.

A great example of visual storytelling is the first 2 minutes from Back To The Future. I’ll just let Claude explain:

You get big on Tech Twitter by constantly having something new to say. Pushing for an intellectual edge, knowing what comes next in 6 months. This intellectual mind-dumping actually hurts you in writing for the screen.

#23 — Cinematic Opportunity

Software engineering is not very cinematic. The process does not have many visual elements that you can anchor an effective visual story against. You have:

• environment

  • an office (hopefully it looks good)

• individual

  • wide: someone sitting, typing at a laptop

  • close-up: hands typing on keyboard

  • extreme close-up: eyes looking around the screen

  • medium close-up, over-the-shoulder: typing at a laptop

  • many more ways to say—typing at a laptop

• team

  • wide: collaborating at a whiteboard

A very limited shot grammar. You can do sitting or standing interviews, have people walk through the space—then you’re out of cinematic options (so you add motion graphics to spice things up..) So your remaining tools are to focus on character arcs, interpersonal conflict, and situation-based drama.

Deeptech has many visual anchors: bio labs, warehouses, robots, rocket engines, satellites, the open ocean, defense testing in the desert. The whole physical world is your oyster. Things explode, fall down, break, make noise, talk.

Opening shots from S3 Episode 41 with Extropic:

Pure software development happens in 1 place, an office. And the product is invisible.

This does not inspire great visual stories, so they do not get produced.

#24 — Physicality

Film work is physical. Going to locations, up and down flights of steps, doing scouts, meeting people, moving heavy gear, setting up lights, tearing everything down, offloading SD cards at home. It is hands-on work, physical work. Only becoming digital later in post-production & distribution.

While I was an engineer, I would be at my laptop 8-10 hours a day, otherwise in meetings or commuting. There is no physical, mobile aspect to software development. Some engineers are very comfortable with that controlled, sedentary aspect to the work. Relaxed, plenty of room to think.

Film production doesn’t offer that luxury. You’re constantly going from writing in solitude to filming on location, and back again. Constant context switching between very offline and very online. In traditional film, production days can be 12hrs+ long.

You can’t write an automation from home for the physical work. It’s structured chaos every time.

Career Engineers Who Became Filmmakers (Few)

To my knowledge, in film history, there hasn’t ever been a mainstream director who came from a sustained career in software (>2-3+ years) and successfully transitioned to film.

There are only 2 prominent cases that come somewhat close.

Mike Judge (creator of “Silicon Valley”) worked in tech for 3 months before leaving to become a bass player:

Shane Carruth, a software engineer for 2 years developed flight-simulation software, made 2 films before ultimately exiting the industry:

Otherwise, it’s never happened.

Just a Few Engineers

In September, I was talking to Donald Jewkes at Cursor’s studio in North Beach. The room was quiet, tables overturned, lights off. Sunlight from the windows poured in, bouncing off the floor.

I explained my apprehensions about leaving engineering for film. I was already 8 months in, the decision was effectively made. But I was struggling—for all the reasons I’ve just listed.

Ben: “I’m worried if I keep at this career, I won’t earn as much as I would in engineering.”

Donald: “I mean…you can make the same amount doing film.”

Ben: “…but there aren’t really any software engineers who are filmmakers here. I think it’s just us.”

Donald: “…”

Donald: “Yeah, I think it might just be us.”

Those here—those who came here as career engineers—are up against incredible odds to become storytellers.

An entire industry must form. Podcasts are not enough. Corporate video is not enough. 1m10s clips are not enough. 2 film studios are not enough.

We need a talent pool of professional actors, writers, directors, cinematographers, producers. All tech-aware. Living here. Many productions running. Forward career mobility.

Silicon Valley must begin to produce great storytellers.