01 — Personal brand film · self-initiated · 2026
Study
First.
Curiosity, on repeat.
A sixty-second film about the part of creative work nobody puts in a reel: the reading before the drawing, the forty sketches that go nowhere, the round that gets killed at eleven at night, and the Tuesday you sit back down anyway. I study first. I need to understand before I create. This is that sentence, made into a film.
Project
Personal brand film · self-initiated
Role
Writer · Director · Designer
Format
:60 hero + three cut-downs
Runtime
0:60
Year
2026
The reel shows the work. This one shows the middle.
Production
Imagine Reign
Spot
Study First
Director
S. Brownlee
Scene
01 — 09
Take
04
Curious
✦
Exploring
✦
Striving
✦
Starting over
✦
Curious
✦
Exploring
✦
Striving
✦
Starting over
✦
02 — Project overview
Every designer’s reel shows the same thing: finished work, in order, looking inevitable. None of it was inevitable. Study First is the other cut — the questions, the dead ends, the rounds that got killed, and the reason I keep coming back to the desk on the days it isn’t working.
It’s a personal brand piece, so the client is me. That made the brief harder, not easier: no logo to hide behind, no product to demo, and a subject — process — that resists being photographed. The film had to earn its sixty seconds on writing and art direction alone.
Format
:60 personal creative brand film
Scope
Concept, script, art direction, storyboard, titles, sound brief, rollout
Audience
Creative directors, hiring teams, and founders looking for a partner rather than a vendor
Role
Sole author — every phase
Status
Self-initiated · 2026
03 — The challenge
How might we
Show what creative work actually takes without making a highlight reel?
A reel proves competence. It doesn’t answer the question anyone hiring a creative is really asking, which is what happens after the first idea fails — because the first idea usually does. The interesting part of this job is invisible: reading things that have nothing to do with design, sketching badly on purpose, throwing out the round you liked most because it was solving the wrong problem.
Filming that is a trap. Push too far toward struggle and it becomes a pity piece. Polish it and you’re back to a highlight reel with better music.
The honest version is the more persuasive one. So the film leads with the research and the rejection, and lets the finished work arrive last — as a consequence, not a claim.
Years in practice
10+
Self-initiated brand worlds built end to end
05
Runtime of the argument
0:60
04 — The big idea
Study first. Then make.
It’s the sentence I’ve said at the start of every project for ten years. Understand the thing before you touch it — the category, the room, the person who has to live with it. Curiosity isn’t a personality trait in this work. It’s the method, and the film treats it that way.
Read the room
Ask one more question
Sketch badly, early
Kill your favorite
Come back Tuesday
Then make it yours
05 — The four beats
Four movements,
one habit.
The film is built as four movements rather than a story with a hero.
Each one is a working state I recognize, and each gets roughly fifteen seconds — including the one most people edit out.
Structure · :60 in four parts
Beat 01
Curious
Every project starts as a stack of things I don’t know yet. The film opens there — books open, tabs open, nothing drawn. The first minute of a job is reading, not designing, and that’s not a delay.
Beat 02
Exploring
Fifty directions, cheap and fast. Exploration is a volume game: you can’t recognize the right answer until you’ve drawn enough of the wrong ones to tell the difference.
Beat 03
Striving
The distance between fine and right is where the hours actually go. Round four exists because round three worked and still wasn’t the thing. Nobody sees round four unless you tell them about it.
Beat 04
Recovering
The work gets killed — sometimes by a client, more often by me. This beat is the reason the film exists. The only skill that matters here is the one that gets you back to the desk the next morning.
08 — The reject pile
Round four exists
because of one, two and three.
This spot went through the exact process it describes, which felt like a fair test.
Here is the pile, three concepts that didn’t survive, and the reason each one didn’t. The last card is the film you just read the board for.
Concept rounds · Jan–Mar 2026
Round 01
Killed
Too safe
A montage of finished work with a voiceover about passion. Competent, forgettable, and it answered a question nobody asked.
Round 02
Killed
Wrong problem
A day-in-the-life. Charming, but it sold a personality instead of a method — and a method is the thing anyone is actually hiring.
Round 04
Shipped
This one
Curiosity as method, rejection as a normal Tuesday, finished work as the consequence. Same honesty, warmer light, better ending.
Hire the process,
not just the portfolio.
Study First is a self-initiated film about how I work: understand it first, explore wider than feels comfortable, keep going past the round that was already fine, and come back after the one that got killed. If that’s the kind of partner your next project needs, I’d like to hear about it.
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