creative technologist
A media production function, built from the ground up
The engine behind Anthropic’s public-facing video and audio.
Scope
Function design, kit, workflow, live production, delivery.
Context
There was no media production function. I had a gut feeling one was needed before there was data to show it, so I started building with the simplest thing that would work and upgraded it as the function proved itself.
Challenge
Turn that into the infrastructure behind everything the company put out — podcasts, webinars, interviews, livestreams, voiceovers, executive announcements — while the demand for it grew faster than the team did.
The work
Ours is the Anthropic side of every set here, except CBS’s.
Voice recording
Credit
Cody Young Video engineer and technical director
I had the vision before he was hired, but I couldn’t implement it as a one-person team. I laid the plans and bought the gear, we tested together, and we landed on a lot of the solutions together.
What went wrong — 1 of 2
Early on, Cody and I didn’t know Anthropic’s visual identity well enough. We found out when a couple of shoots came back with lighting and colour grading that didn’t sit with what Brand Creative was doing at a larger scale, and they flagged it.
What I took from it
How to produce the look and feel of a distinct visual identity with clear creative direction and exact technical specs.
What went wrong — 2 of 2
Media production wasn’t an official department, so it had none of the operational infrastructure internal event support had, and the standard intake process didn’t fit it. For months the asks came in as unofficial Slack messages. Media work can be last-minute by nature, so that often meant a few hours to a couple of days of lead time.
What I did about it
I made a media support Slack channel to funnel every request into one place, and we folded those into the Event support triage process, until we could demarcate media production as a separate thing.
Cadence
Three to six pieces a week
Reach
Live audiences of fifteen thousand; pieces past two million views