Portfolio

Projects

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Angeltown Film
Arcules Security
Disneyland Resort
Dodge Documentary
Double-Dead Film
Fovitec Lighting
Going Mental Film
Interfit Photographic
Luminate Nightclub
Sedríque Musician
Silk Thai Cafe
Simple Sprout Garden

Arcules Security

Branding
Advertising
UI/UX

arcules.com

As an innovative SaaS (cloud software) video surveillance brand within the traditional hardware-focused security industry, Arcules was struggling to outwardly express their unique approach to modern security and customer-centric service.

Despite having an incredibly user-friendly product that saves customers millions of dollars in new hardware, the brand was acting as if it were a late-stage company with too much focus on the bits and bytes of the product, and not enough value-based human storytelling.

Joining the company, I helped to bottle up their warm start-up culture and express the incredible value of a cloud-native surveillance platform across their logo, website, user interfaces, packaging, display ads, video content, and beyond. Beginning with a new brand style guide, all the way to a welcoming 20'x20' expo booth that brought to life the value proposition and aspirational security-as-a-service movement Arcules wanted to sell.

Interfit Photographic

Branding
Advertising
Product Design

interfitphoto.com

Interfit Photographic is a company with deep roots going back to 2001 when high-tech flash was cutting edge. I actually first learned studio photography using Interfit gear! It all came full-circle when I had the opportunity to guide the company's rebrand and design new products from the inside for our next generation of photographers.

During my tenure, we were able to achieve increased sales and consumer perception significantly through a 360-degree redesign of the logos, commercial videos, product photography, packaging, user interfaces, e-commerce experience, email marketing, tradeshow booths, and so much more. With one campaign, we were able to achieve the same revenue in a single week that the company produced in direct sales during all of Q4, 2018.

Overarching milestones included establishing Interfit products in untapped market segments through social media outreach and ad campaigns, shifting a nearly all-male, 40+ audience to include millennials and 20% more women. By collaborating with our product manager and engineering team, we developed a suite of new products as well - some of which won awards in recent years as hot items to buy with the best user-focused design.

Simple Sprout Garden

Branding
UI/UX
Product Design

simplesprout.co

The story of Simple Sprout began when a coworker and I were fed up with the limited options available for hydroponic gardening. We realized we could apply our technical expertise in LED technology from the photo and video world to a new vertical. Knowing that the markets for urban farming, healthy eating, and the Internet of Things were thriving, while the market for smart gardens was relatively unsaturated, we knew it could be a hit.

Hydroponic technology is totally the future - it uses 90% less water than soil crops, requires 1/4 of the space, doesn't require dirt that can carry dangerous bacteria, and grows plants 3x faster! Let's face the facts though, it's either painfully complicated or tragically expensive to start growing your own hydroponic garden, and the other "smart gardens" out there are just not quite the right design, build quality, or price.

We set out to change all that with Simple Sprout by applying our combined expertise to build something truly special, high quality, and delightfully simple. From gardens built using milled aluminum and FDA certified food-grade plastic, to beautiful design and insanely simple scan-and-go seed pod recognition system. Simple Sprout makes eating fresh greens more affordable and knowing where your food comes from as easy as making toast or microwaving a frozen dinner.

Fovitec Lighting

Advertising
E-Commerce
Brand Management

fovitec.com

Fovitec is the more consumer-focused, social media vlogger / indie filmmaker / e-commerce photo and video equipment sister brand of Interfit. While working with the parent investment group (Omnius Holdings), I was introduced to Fovitec to help tailor the overall brand image to relevant audiences, design new product sub-brands and packaging, refine their e-commerce presence, and develop a simplified direct sales experience.

Over the course of my time working with the brand, we completely shot all new product images for a unified look, rewrote all promotional copy specifically targeting unique features over competing brands, and created fresh Amazon lifestyle content depicting the benefits and uses for each listing. A significant portion of time was spent refining the Fovitec site shopping UX with a rapid search and filter system along with a mobile-friendly responsive interface. Much of the restyling centered around providing a more clean and on-brand cohesiveness, while the back-end code was optimized for 3x faster load times.

Together with the content development team, I art directed several new product launches including promotional campaign photo and video shoots for a professional quality ring light and the brand design for a line of advanced LED monolights.

Luminate Nightclub

Creative Direction
Social Media
Motion Graphics

luminate socal facebook

An Orange County nightclub with a very straight, Vegas-style business structure approached me to creative direct a new event with hopes of breathing life into their typically dead Sunday nights. Considering that the only other clubs offering an event for the LGBT community were designed just for gay men or lacking excitement, I wanted to create something that would appease the venue's desire for a large crowd while also bringing a more accepting event to the entire LGBTQIAP+ community.

We began with a market research study to get a feel for what the community wanted to see, and what resulted was Luminate: an upscale and modern program featuring local LGBTQ staff with the hottest DJ's, upcoming drag queens and kings, plus go-go dancers of all genders and orientations.

I designed a full brand system from the basic color scheme and core values to posters, palmcards, a social media network reaching over 4,000 impressions per week, high production value shows, and custom LED wall motion graphics.

Sedríque Musician

Branding
Web Design
Copywriting

sedrique.com

A talented Los Angeles singer/songwriter and actor who reached out seeking a fresh look to relaunch his brand from Cedric Stephens, to Sedríque for his next album. He had paid another brand manager a large sum of money, only to receive an unfinished and messy product in return.

I stepped in to help create a new logotype, color scheme, style guide, and website with custom content management system for the artist within less than a month to beat the album launch timeline.

Over the next week, an artist bio was also written for him to use on Spotify and in press publications. The total bill came in less than the previous team and the finished product surpassed expectations for the client.

Angeltown Film

Marketing Campaigns
Video Editing
Graphic Design

Marketing Plan

Angeltown is an edgy independent melodrama told from the perspective of a Korean Marilyn Monroe escort in Los Angeles who was estranged from her abusive father. As such, the film called for a mixed Asian and American target demographic as well as a platform release to determine its marketability.

To market such a mature film, it was crucial to focus on its strengths as a piece of independent cinema with nods to the feminist and Asian-American communities. The target audiences of this film ranged from adult women all the way to cinemaphiles and young men, so product placements among popular cosmetics brands and busy city coffee cups were key.

By positioning the movie somewhere between a chick-flick and a gritty drama, Angeltown maintained a personality that lent itself well to guerilla marketing and publicity stunts such as pop-up karaoke stations for the girls, and Vegas-style escort calling cards for the guys.

Disneyland Resort

Advertising
Strategic Planning
Product Marketing

Together with the Disneyland Resort team in Anaheim, I directed an advertising team to develop a new seasonal campaign. With new security checkpoints at all entrypoints, congested parking and a dwindling revenue stream, Disney asked us to reignite guest passion for more than just a place to grab coffee before hitting the parks.

Being attached to Disneyland, Downtown Disney became a thoroughfare instead of a destination - so we pitched a campaign called "Summer Setlist" where guests could experience Downtown Disney as an exciting extension of the parks by highlighting exclusive merchandise, offering promotional discounts, live entertainment, and surprises throughout the summer. To make things more trackable and personal, we created a VIP pass to scan at retailers that would allow access to special treatment for a small fee.

Leveraging Disney's existing social media network and the power of influencers, we planned to target younger audiences who weren't spending their disposable income at Disney, without using much of our budget. For adults and families, we would launch geographic and interest-based digital campaigns within the Los Angeles DMA. In the end, our team created an event concept that was on-budget with the potential to bring up average guest spend beyond Disney's estimates and attract more leads than anticipated in our market research.

Silk Thai Cafe

Branding
Advertising
Social Media

silkthaicafe.com

Silk Thai Cafe is a romantically lit and quaint little cafe in the historical district of Tacoma, Washington. The restaurant offers traditional Thai food in a beautiful setting. As soon as you walk in, the authentic decor and soothing aromatic spices make you feel instantly relaxed.

The only problem? It was relatively hidden, had an outdated website, and no major branding or social outlets. Working with the owners, I was able to assist them in expanding their audience to younger college clients as well as polish the existing brand into something upscale yet warm, and as unforgettable as their service and decor.

With an all new website, photography, logo, uniforms, menus, in-store social connectivity, public relations management and local ad placements, I doubled their awareness and brought in so much business that the owners are planning to open another restaurant to keep up!

Dodge Documentary

Public Relations
Social Media
Film Production

chapman.edu/dodge

Chapman University recruited me to assist their Dodge College of Film & Media Arts in developing a marketing campaign for the new MFA in Documentary Filmmaking. The proposed degree was a much-needed component of the offerings at Dodge College, bridging the gap between journalistic reporting of real-world stories and creative expression.

To begin, we assembled a large pool of research on the competition and organized it into a SWOT analysis along with various comparisons to figure out our best points of leverage. From there, a focus group of potential students with diverse backgrounds were interviewed and surveyed for further primary data.

Once the information was collected and organized, a series of social media videos were produced featuring professor interviews and student films to advertise the degree, focusing on the students' needs and desires in an exciting way.

Double-Dead Film

Visual Effects
Video Editing

imdb listing

Double-Dead is a dark comedy film directed by Celine Hoppe involving twins, a mortuary, and an eccentric demon named Voodoo. The Morrgan family owns and runs a mortuary, but they're retiring and passing the business on to their favorite daughter, Skylar.

Sky is everything her parents could hope for: eccentrically strange, victorian goth, with a love for blood, organs, and dead bodies. She's the embalmer in the family - the perfect candidate for taking over the business. Her sister Chris is the outcast. In a family where being creepy and strange is the norm, Chris sticks out like a sore thumb for being the normal one. In this crazy adventure, a resurrected Chris and a furious Sky must work together to build the perfect body out of parts in the mortuary, for an eccentric demon who threatens everything they hold dear.

The aesthetic of the film is inspired by Tim Burton with a storyline reminiscent of The Addams Family, so when I was asked to work on the various visual effects magic scenes, these were really important styles to draw from. The film has a sort of TV show / after school special vibe that keeps things lighthearted despite the darkness of it all, so I designed the effects to be quirky and cheesy in line with that.

Going Mental Film

Entertainment Marketing
Unit Photography

imdb listing

Going Mental is a film directed by Camara Rauen that follows a young girl's journey to face her social anxiety. After being rejected by friends at her old high school because of her panic attacks, Shaina wants to make a fresh start.

She ends up taking advice from her new school counselor to keep her issues to herself so she can fit in. No matter how hard she tries though, the memory of her confrontation with her old friends continues to haunts her. When she befriends Dale, a comfortably depressed student, she gets challenged in what she has been told to believe about her mental health. She is unaware that the key to overcoming her anxiety may lie in the lyrics of her favorite band.

I assisted this production with the development of a trailer to promote the film's music and mental illness themes, created a poster of the main character's favorite band for use on set, and took unit photography for marketing purposes.