Updating the Digital Catalog
June 2026
I’ve spent the last few weeks staring at old timelines, wrestling with compression codecs, and pulling the backend of my entire film catalog apart.
On paper, it looks like standard digital housecleaning: updating thumbnails, unifying the branding across this site, and building out a cohesive archive. But under the hood, it turned into a massive, deeply personal technical puzzle.
A lot of my older work was shot on whatever gear I could scrape together at the time. When you try to push legacy digital formats and early HD footage into a modern 4K exhibition standard, the pixels fight back. You get hit with brutal digital artifacting, macroblocking, and that cold, plastic digital noise that kills a cinematic frame.
To solve it, I had to build a specific pipeline: uprezzing the core footage to 4K to satisfy the modern streaming bitrates, and then carefully overlaying a heavy, intentional, organic film grain. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to collect some high resolution scans of some fuji stock, and I’m starting to build a kodak library as well. The grain acts as a unifying texture. It eats the digital artifacts, rounds out the sharp compression edges, and gives the digital frames the tactile, high-contrast, grit-and-grit industrial look that matches my current work like The Snail. It turns a technical limitation into an aesthetic choice.
But looking back through these old projects wasn't just a technical exercise. It’s been a psychological shift.
I’ll be honest: sure, I want to make a feature. I want to be a successful filmmaker. But deeper than that, this whole overhaul was about a personal promise to stop leaving things unfinished. It’s about looking at my early, earnest efforts and choosing not to be ashamed of them.
It is incredibly easy in Los Angeles to fall into the trap of comparing your journey to someone else’s. I’ve never owned the best cameras. I can’t afford a well-appointed, heavily budgeted shoot. My creations are raw, they’re scrappy, and at times they are completely unpolished.
But at the end of the day, they are finished.
I can look at every single one of these films and say, without reservation, that it represents my most earnest effort with exactly what I had available in the time I had to do it.
Clearing out this back catalog of unfinished ideas and legacy files wasn’t just about cleaning up the past. It’s how I’m building the next phase. You can’t properly frame the future when you're carrying the weight of a dozen half-baked timelines. By finalizing these pieces, giving them the visual DNA they deserved, and locking them into the archive, I’m finally cleared the deck.
The plumbing is fixed. The creative moat is dug. The slate is clean, and the next scripts are already on the desk.
Let's see what happens next.
