Narrative Strategy & Film · Dayton, Ohio
I work with people protecting the wild places, the life within them, and legacies worth carrying forward. My job is to find the story they have been too close to see, then build the structure that carries it.
Not a production crew. Not a brand consultant. A narrative architect who diagnoses first & puts the camera down last.
The Work
Most conservation films are built around fear & scale. They show the size of what's being lost and hope the weight moves the audience to act. It rarely does.
This film was built around a different diagnosis. The problem isn't awareness. It's isolation. People who love the natural world already know what's at stake. What they're missing is the felt sense that they're not carrying it alone.
The architecture came first. The camera came second.
Produced for Cincinnati Nature Center · Signal & Succession · 2026
About
13 years documenting human stories for a national nonprofit. Work that took me across 50+ countries, into rooms where the subject had every reason not to trust the camera, where the story only surfaced if you had built something real first.
After that, 7 years in the theme park industry at Six Flags & Cedar Fair. A different discipline, the same underlying question: what does this story have to make people feel?
I built Signal & Succession because the organizations doing the most important work, conservation groups, nature centers, legacy institutions, mission-driven businesses, are losing the narrative battle to outfits with bigger agencies & louder tactics. Not because their story is weaker. Because nobody has built the architecture underneath it.
I work across conservation, ecology, regional heritage, & mission-driven organizations, based in Dayton, with engagements across North America. I take a small number of engagements each year. The ones where the story is worth the work.
The Approach
The footage is rarely where it breaks.
The crews who make these films are good. Many of them care deeply. I know, because I was one of them. The problem almost never starts at the camera. It starts earlier, before the camera comes out of the case, with a question nobody is asked to answer: what does this story have to make the audience feel, believe, or do differently? That question doesn't live in a production brief. It lives in the architecture. So that is where I start.
The Process
Every engagement starts with a conversation, not a quote. The diagnostic work is the work. The production is proof of it.
I do the work the communications director has been doing alone, with you.
I sit with your leadership & communications team and diagnose the real story problem. Not the brief. Not the campaign concept that's already half-formed. The actual gap between what your organization does and what your audience understands about it.
The room is built so that the truth comes out.
On-location production, interviews, field capture. I have spent my career in environments where the only currency that mattered was trust. That isn't a soft skill. It's the technical advantage that determines what the camera actually finds.
The edit is not post-production. It's architecture.
The narrative arc was designed in phase one. The edit builds it. The result is a hero film, cutdowns, & an asset library your communications team can actually deploy. Not a stack of files. A system.
The story doesn't end at delivery. It gets stewarded.
A deployment roadmap by audience & surface. A measurement framework. For organizations whose narrative evolves over time, I offer ongoing retainer partnerships that keep the work compounding.
Engagements
For organizations that want to understand the gap before committing to a larger engagement. A live diagnostic session & a written strategic brief you can act on immediately, with or without me.
For organizations whose story matters enough to get right once instead of replacing it every 2 years. The full build, all 04 phases: hero film, cutdowns, asset library, deployment roadmap.
For organizations whose mission is long and whose story has to keep pace with it. Quarterly diagnostic checkpoints, ongoing narrative consulting, & priority access for production needs.
I work best with legacy organizations, 10 years in or more, that have built something real. The story they have been telling hasn't kept pace with what they have actually built, & that gap is costing them.
If you need a quick video for next month's deadline, I'm not the right fit, & I'll tell you that directly. If you need the story your organization has been trying to tell for a decade to finally land the way it should, let's talk.
Or run the free Story Diagnostic. 6 questions your team can answer this week.No call required, no pitch attached.Download it here