I Have an Eye, Not a Theory

I can't give you the theory.

I love Swiss design — the grid, the restraint, the way a page can go quiet and still say everything. But I couldn't walk you through the school it came from or name the people who built it. I know what I like, and I know exactly why I like it. For a while I thought that gap was something to hide. I've decided it's the point.

Taste isn't a body of knowledge you apply. It's a thousand small corrections you can feel before you can explain them. I can't always tell you the rule. I can tell you the frame it's wrong on.

A cut that misses the beat by three frames will bother me for the rest of the day. I hate that I care that much. But when the picture is moving and the cut lands exactly on the downbeat, it's so satisfying it's almost embarrassing — and nobody watching could tell you why the first version feels cheap and the second feels expensive. They're not supposed to know. That's my job, not theirs.

When we put a logo at the end of a film, I want it cinematic-small — fifteen, maybe twenty percent of the frame. Everyone's instinct in the room is to make it bigger. The instinct is almost always wrong. Confidence reads small.

We shoot a stop or two hot and bring it back down in post — cleaner image, no noise. We'd done it for years before anyone on the team asked me to explain why. That's usually the tell: the things you do without a reason ready are the things you actually know. The reasons are something you reverse-engineer later, for other people.

None of this came from studying. It came from looking. I steal, openly. I watch the best people work — Canada, COLLINS, Pentagram, just to name a few, the studios whose work I'd have killed to make — and I take the thing I love and fine-tune it to whatever is actually in front of me. I'm not trying to reproduce them. I'm trying to find the parallel: what is the real story in this footage, and which of the moves I've stolen will tell it.

The conviction under all of it is simple, and it's the one rule I'd defend to anyone: humanity first, science second. People come for a person; you give them the idea after they've decided to care.

I'll admit the limits. This is hard to teach and harder to fake. The taste is cultural — a feel for this room, this story, this person. You can't hand someone that in a note. And you can't bluff it the other direction either. Anyone who actually has the eye can tell, in about four seconds, whether you do too.

So no — I don't have a framework. I have years of being unable to leave the slightly-wrong version alone.

It turns out that's the job.