Magic Tricks at Checkout

Before any of this was a career, I was doing magic tricks for strangers checking out at my grandparents' grocery store. Later it was music, in front of family and friends who would come over. The medium kept changing on me: a deck of cards, coins, a drum kit, a camera, eventually a website. But the thing underneath stayed exactly the same. I've only ever cared about one thing, and it's people. The reaction on someone's face. Making strangers feel entertained after paying for their bread.

It took me years to understand that the reaction was the job, and the creative was just how I got there. The trick, the song, the edit — those are delivery systems. What I was chasing every time was the person on the other end.

I've spent the last fifteen years pointing that same instinct at research institutions. I ended up embedded in science — NASA research programs, people doing genuinely historic work — and what got me, over and over, was how little of it ever reaches anyone. The achievement is real. The feeling never shows up. We're sending the first woman to the Moon and somehow it barely registers.

I don't think that's anyone's fault, exactly. The people doing the work were never asked to make you feel it. A scientist is trained to be precise, and being moving is a completely different muscle. The two almost never live in the same body. So the most extraordinary thing in the building goes out as a slide deck and quietly dies there.

What I learned — mostly by getting it wrong for a while — is that you have to walk in through the human. Open on the science, the instrument, the method, the result, and most of the room is already gone. Ninety percent, and ninety is kinda generous. So I go the other way around. Let people care about someone first, and the science walks in behind that, welcome.

The goal honestly isn't to inform anybody. I want your chest to get a little tight at the right moment. When we make a film about a research team, I'm not checking whether you understood the method afterward — I'm watching to see if you felt what was at stake. Hidden Figures is the cleanest version of this I know: it works because you're with those three women first, so by the time the math actually matters, it hits you somewhere real. The humanity set the science up to land.

Here's where I'll complicate my own point, because the honest version has a contradiction in it. People love to say it's all about story, never production value. I've said it myself. But sometimes it really is the camera. Sometimes it's the color, or the grain, or a slightly blurry shadow on a wall in black and white that doesn't mean a thing and is purely a feeling — and I love that just as much. When my wife and I thought about our wedding film, we wanted a real arc: composition, a build, emotion in a deliberate order. A lot of what I see now is pure vibe, a stack of pretty moments with no spine. And the truth is I love both. Vibe is its own craft. The grade, the grain, the restraint — that is the feeling, doing its job.

So I've given up trying to pick a single philosophy. The work I care about is the combination: pull the inspiration, hold a real baseline of polish and feel, and aim all of it at one person trying to reach another.

I think about that more now that machines can make so much of this, so fast. The tools keep getting better at the surface of the work. They still don't care about anybody, though — and I think people can feel that, maybe more than they used to.

There's a practical reason I ever got to learn any of this, and it's trust. You only get to make humanity-first work when someone trusts you enough to let you. Not handed a brief — invited into the room. In the staff meeting, asking the question nobody thought to ask, then trusted to take the idea and run. I'd put every good thing we've made down to that trust before any talent of mine.

So what's it all for? Bringing people in. When we make something for a research program, the win I genuinely care about is a student watching it and thinking the stakes are real, and they're needed. The kid somewhere far from any of this who wants to be a scientist, able to watch the talk the next day, for free. The next person who signs up because something we made got through to them.

So when someone asks what I do, the truest answer I have is smaller than a job title. I find the person inside the work, and I get you close enough to feel what's at stake. It's the same thing I was doing with a deck of cards at checkout, decently, at fourteen — just with bigger cameras and higher stakes now.