The creative industry has a problem it won't talk about.
In 1964, a designer named Ken Garland stood up in front of his industry and said something nobody wanted to hear.
He said the creative industry was wasting itself. That the most skilled communicators in human history were spending their careers making dog biscuits look appealing and cigarettes look sophisticated. That there were more important things to make. He called it the First Things First Manifesto and asked his colleagues to sign it.
Twenty-two people did.
The industry ignored it.
Sixty years later, the average person is exposed to somewhere between four thousand and ten thousand commercial messages a day. Global advertising spending outpaces global economic growth. And the organisations genuinely trying to change something — working on climate, on inequality, on the things that will define what kind of world your children inherit — consistently get the leftover budget and the junior team.
The best filmmakers, the best designers, the best strategists in the country are working on oat milk and cryptocurrency and luxury apartments. Not because they don't care. Because that's where the money is, and the industry built itself around the money.
I've spent my career trying to do it differently.
Not perfectly. Not without compromise. But differently.
I've made films for Patagonia and Greenpeace and Oxfam and WWF because I believe, still, that a well-made film can change how someone thinks about something they'd stopped thinking about. That story is the most powerful tool for human change ever invented. That it matters what you point it at.
The creative industry has a problem it won't talk about. It's wasting itself on things that don't matter while the things that do matter go unmade.
Know Studio exists because I couldn't stop caring about that.
If you couldn't either - we should talk.
