We make films for people who give a shit. Here's what that actually means.
At 21, I sat in a lecture room in Ballarat and wrote a thesis that I've been trying to live up to ever since.
It argued that the creative industry - design, film, story, culture - was wasting the most powerful tools for human change ever invented. That these tools had the capacity to shift how people think, what people believe, what people do. And that almost nobody was using them for anything that actually mattered.
I dedicated it to "the silent majority, the outspoken minority, and those that believe they are free."
I meant every word.
Then I spent twenty years trying to prove it was possible to do otherwise. I made films for Patagonia about mountain ranges disappearing. For Greenpeace on boats in places nobody was looking. For Oxfam about people living on less than two dollars a day. For WWF about animals that would be gone before most people knew they existed. For National Geographic in places so remote the nearest town was three days away.
Not because I was the most technically brilliant filmmaker in Melbourne. Because I turned up to every single one of those projects believing completely in what we were making.
That's the only thing I know how to do.
Along the way I also made films for musicians recording albums they'd been waiting fifteen years to make. For chefs who drove four hours to find the right supplier because it mattered to them that the food was real. For people doing extraordinary things that the world hadn't found out about yet.
None of those clients came to me because I was the cheapest option. They came because somewhere - in a conversation, in a piece of work they'd seen, in something someone had told them - they got the sense that I actually gave a shit about what they were doing.
They were right. I did. I do.
Know Studio exists for those people. The ones who care so completely about what they're making that it shows up in every decision they make, every compromise they refuse, every hour they spend on something most people would have called finished.
The subject doesn't matter. The musician and the campaign director and the environmental scientist and the chef are all the same person to me. They're people who mean it.
That's who we make films for.
If that's you - I'd love to know what you're working on.
