my approach and background
The summary version: I direct award-winning commercials, music videos, and television, across many genres, styles, and techniques.
My dual background as a screenwriter and visual artist has inspired my sweet spot of combining inventive, larger-than-life visuals with nuanced characters, developed narratives, and grounded humanity. The resulting work has amassed more than 5 billion YouTube hits (and billions of broadcast views), taken me to 40 countries, won numerous awards, and given me the opportunity to collaborate with some of the world’s best artists, musicians, brands, actors, athletes, and creators.
I am an independent director, pairing with select production and post-production partners, depending on client needs and what's best for the project. I've built an extensive array of relationships with key creative and production leaders across the industry, making me just as much at home in collaborating on projects from concept-to-delivery as I am with focusing only on directing and production.
Other than that, I love my wife, I'm obsessive and passionate about creating projects worth watching, and I frequently hypothesize about the psychological leanings of our 3 cats.
.grady
. . . if you're still curious, here's the unnecessarily in-depth version: Fresh out of UCLA, I got very lucky, as my passion for film & television landed me an early TV development job working on TV movies and series pilots with a prolific producer/mogul who became a key mentor. After a few years, I sold my own TV series pilot, then wrote for a few series and TV movies before moving to staff writing for a SyFy Channel anthology series.
Enjoying and thriving in my expanded creative and production roles, I became one of the founding directors of Motion Theory, spearheading the company's transformation from a pure design studio into a full-service, concept-to-delivery content creation company. While there, I pioneered the development of a trademark studio approach and style that remixed live action, design, and visual effects in entirely new ways -- which has continued to empower the efficiency and creative innovation of my directing approach to this day.
This wide-ranging creative experience sometimes makes it challenging to encapsulate my work, but I look at it very simply: I combine high-concept visuals and down-to-earth humanity to create content that engages viewers. Unlike traditional, "single-genre" creators, I actively draw upon the strengths and benefits of many genres, styles, and techniques in order to create truly original and compelling content. And I use my writing, design, television, and VFX backgrounds to make projects better every step of the process, whatever the budget level.
My reel shares some fun highlights. Other notable writing and directing projects include Sam Raimi’s hit cable series Spartacus: Blood & Sand, which I also developed and helped to launch; music videos for artists such as Katy Perry, Beck, R.E.M., and Capital Cities; and award-winning commercial campaigns for dozens of major brands across virtually every category. In addition to the honors listed in awards, I was named to Filestage’s 2019 “Best 50 Commercial Directors in the World” list; Boards magazine’s “Directors to Watch” and “Top 10 Directors in Demand” lists; as well as Rolling Stone magazine’s “Hot List” as a music video director; and my work has been featured in Wired, Entertainment Weekly, Ad Age, Fast Company, Time, The New York Times, CNN, BBC, and many others.
(However, I will plainly admit that, unfortunately, I still haven't set aside the time to create a proper social media presence, even for our 3 preternaturally photogenic cats and continent-jumping adventures. And I can't promise that's going to change any time soon, as work and life happily keeps me fully engaged and overly occupied.)
.grady