Portfolio
(Keep scrolling down to check out my work)
Care that moves with you
INSIGHT
Aged-care advertising usually shows people as their needs, not their lives. But receiving care doesn't mean the life stops. In rural Victoria, people are still restoring tractors and re-enacting the Gold Rush, thanks to the in-home care they’re getting from Australian Unity.
IDEA
Lead with the life, not the care. Real customers, filmed doing the things that make them themselves, with the care in the background where it belongs. Social cuts pull you in, the full stories carry you through.
ROLE
Creative Director, shot the videos and worked with the content team and our editors to finalise 10+ versions across social and paid formats.
Click any image to watch the full videos.
Frankie Magazine
THE WORK
Photography for print and web, social video and reels, and branded partnership content, shooting to a masthead with a very particular voice and aesthetic.
ROLE
Editorial photographer and content creator, working directly with Frankie's Creative Director, and contributing to concepting on the video work.
Click any image to look at the full work.
The Wellbeing Index
INSIGHT
Research findings feel like they're about everyone, which can mean they feel like they're about no one. People scroll past data until it becomes a question about them.
IDEA
Each year, find the angle that makes the data personal, then carry it across every format the audience lives in: a flagship report, magazine-style articles, social cuts, and video. The social stops the scroll, the articles and video carry people deeper, the report is the destination. Twenty-five years of Australian Unity and Deakin research, made to feel like it's about you.
ROLE
Creative Director across the full campaign. Shot and edited the video work, directed the social concepts and print version with my team of designers and animators.
Top to bottom, feature video (click to check it out), social campaign assets, flagship report excerpt.
Commissioning & production management
WHAT I DO NOW
A lot of what the studio ships is work I direct or manage but don't personally shoot. I brief and commission external photographers and videographers across Australia, then manage their output to a brand-and-broadcast standard.
Recent: commissioned a Brisbane DOP to film a brand ambassador; the footage ran as B-roll in a live Australian Unity TV spot on Channel 7. Another was commissioning press photography of our customers for use by Nine networks.
I'm briefing and directing this work constantly — multiple shoots a month, across a range of formats.
Brief Builder
& Voice Checker
THE PROBLEM
We're a studio of four looking after eleven business units. There's no way we can put eyes on everything that goes out, so a lot of it never comes near us. Marketers get stuck at the two spots that matter most: writing a brief that actually tells us what they need, and checking their copy sounds like Australian Unity before it ships. Both usually mean waiting on someone in the studio — and we can't be everywhere.
THE SOLUTION
A couple of tools that cover the two spots I mentioned earlier, so people can help themselves and still work within our standards.
Brief Builder takes the pain out of the front end. You either answer a few questions from a chatbot (about two minutes), or just dump in an email, some notes, whatever you've got — and it turns that into a proper brief in our internal format. If something's missing, it keeps asking until it's got what the studio actually needs. You tidy it up at the end, then copy it out or paste it straight into our briefing system.
Voice Checker handles the back end. Paste your copy, tell it who it's for — B2C, B2B or internal — and it scores how well you're hitting our voice and writing guidelines, then flags exactly what's off. Every issue comes with a "try this instead" and a quick reason why, or you can grab the whole rewritten version in one go.
WHY IT MATTERS
I couldn't clone the studio, so I built the next best thing: guardrails. These two put a bit of our judgment in the room even when none of us are — better briefs coming in, more on-brand copy going out, without four people trying to be everywhere at once. It's the version of AI I actually care about — not replacing the craft, just handing the standards to the people who need them.
The paper edit
THE PROBLEM
Going through interviews can be a pain. Sometimes it helps to have a structure on paper before the footage gets cut up.
THE SOLUTION
I present: JB’s Big Miracle Machine™, which is a personalised paper edit creation station. You start with your interview files in a folder, and you end up with an .XML file you can bring into your editing software to add your b-roll or whatever else too.
WHY IT MATTERS
This thing destroys ‘the dread of the blank page’ by letting you see a bunch of sound grabs at a glance, click and drag some stuff into a running order, see and hear how it sounds, and finally spits out something you can directly work with in your editing software.
I’ve loaded it up with some dummy interview transcripts from Don’t Do Anything Stupid With This, so check it out!
The Wireless / Radio New Zealand
WHAT CAME BEFORE
Before the in-house studio work, I was RNZ's Dunedin correspondent for The Wireless, their youth and culture channel — reporting with a camera, producing video, audio and photo for the website and broadcast.
This was public-broadcast storytelling for a real audience rather than a brand, which is a different discipline entirely. I pitched, shot, cut and delivered my own stories end to end. One of them, "Rudeism plays games wrong," got picked up by other broadcasters and hit 650K views on RNZ's own channels.
Click any image to view the full video.
Switching moments
INSIGHT
People don't switch health insurance on a schedule. They switch at the moments life makes them stop and ask if it still makes sense.
IDEA
Meet them inside that moment, in their own words. Each execution is the thought a customer is already having, made into the ad.
ROLE
Creative Director. Set the concept and directed the work across the team, from OOH to social to web.
Parenting Up
INSIGHT
When you start caring for the people who raised you, the hardest part isn't the admin. It's starting the conversation. "Mum, when did you last see a doctor?" is a harder sentence than it looks.
IDEA
A podcast for the Sandwich Generation, built around the tough talks themselves, with host Jean Kittson and experts making the conversations that feel impossible feel possible.
ROLE
Creative Director. Directed and engineered the recording sessions, cut the episodes with our editor, and led the creative across branding and social.
The work behind
‘the work’
None of this is my job. It’s stuff I make for fun. A heavy metal record, a short film, a music video, and a frog cult I found in my letterbox. It's the same instinct that shows up in everything above, just off the leash. Woof!
Click any image to check the projects out.
