We become captivated when a story moves. When the right image meets the right sound at the right moment, something in the viewer shifts, often before there are words for what was felt. That is the particular magic of video, and it is why I keep coming back to it.
I came to filmmaking the same way I came to most things: through curiosity and proximity. A camera in my hands as a kid in Hong Kong, a borrowed device in Los Angeles, a job as an environmental programme coordinator in Panamá, eventually a one-way ticket to rural Nepal, where the only way to sustain a global community of donors and volunteers was to make them feel like they were there. In the mud. In the morning light. Making bricks, watching the goats, part of the lives of the people we were working alongside. Photographs can invoke those emotions. Words can describe the sensations. Videos can bring us even closer still to the lived experience.
It is a medium that can inform, educate, inspire, and entertain. With depth, with levity, and when the story calls for it, with grief. A 90-second film made in a rural Himalayan village can move someone in Canada to give. A three-minute testimonial shot in a Ōtautahi Christchurch school can perhaps convince a family in Munich to trust a place they have never visited with their teenager. A short portrait of a nomadic earth builder can make a viewer stop scrolling and remember what it feels like to work with their hands in the mud.
Below is a collection of work from 2016 onwards, each made in the spirit of that original conviction: that the most important stories are worth the care it takes to tell them well.
Wilderness Travel - Ultimate South Island (2026)
Wilderness Travel is a California-based adventure travel company running guided expeditions across more than 200 destinations worldwide, and their Ultimate South Island hiking tour is one of their flagship offerings: 15 days moving through four of New Zealand's Great Walks, an overnight cruise in Milford Sound, kiwi spotting on remote Rakiura Stewart Island, glacier hiking in Mt. Aspiring National Park, sea kayaking in Abel Tasman, and pinot noir in Central Otago. When a dear friend who guides this very itinerary extended an invitation to join a trip and document it, saying yes was not a difficult decision. What followed was one of the most meaningful filming experiences of my time in Aotearoa NZ, not simply because of the staggering visual richness of Te Waipounamu South Island, but because moving through these landscapes in the company of knowledgeable guides deepened my understanding of the ecology, history, and pūrākau (stories, myths) of a place I now call home. This film is both a promotional piece for Wilderness Travel and something more personal too - a showcase that the islands I chose to root into are extraordinary, magical, and needs to be preserved.
Kiwi Way Education (2026)
When Kiwi Way Education approached me for a testimonial film for Didacta, the largest education trade fair in Europe, the ask was straightforward but the stakes were real: a young German student named Leonard, studying at St Andrew's College in Ōtautahi Christchurch, speaking directly to camera about what it genuinely feels like to leave home, land somewhere unfamiliar, and find your footing with the right people around you. The audience is both the teenagers curious about studying abroad and the parents who need to feel certain before they say yes, two very different emotional registers to hold in the same film. Filmed on campus across a single morning, with questions appearing on screen and no interviewer visible, the edit leans into simplicity and honesty rather than production gloss, because when the subject matter is trust, the film itself has to earn it first. It was easeful to work with the Kiwi Way Education team as they knew exactly the type of testimonial video to produce alongside me.
Regeneration Field Institute (2023)
The Regeneration Field Institute was founded in coastal Ecuador in the aftermath of the 2016 earthquake, building seismically safe bamboo homes and establishing agroforestry systems on their 70-acre farm in Chone as living proof that regenerative design can be both practical and beautiful. During my time there as a land regeneration group leader and cultural interpreter, I filmed this short document of a University of Virginia student cohort working through the full arc of a project-based learning experience: learning the principles of syntropic agroforestry directly on the land, hands in the soil, then designing and constructing a bamboo bus stop for the local community from the same material growing around them. What I wanted to capture was the particular quality of learning that only happens when your classroom is a living ecosystem and the outcome of your work belongs to real people in a real village. These students arrived as visitors and left having made something that will outlast their time there, which is a rare and generous kind of education.
Stories for Impact Workshop (2025)
In partnership with Digital Storytellers and Seed Waikato, I co-facilitated a two-day Stories for Impact workshop in Kirikiriroa Hamilton alongside lead facilitator Erica Austin, bringing together fifteen community organisers, changemakers, and non-profit practitioners to explore how digital storytelling can do more than document work, but actually surface shared narratives, deepen collective understanding, and catalyse real systems change. Participants moved through scripting, filming, editing, and sharing their own short stories over two full days, leaving not just with new skills but as the founding members of an ongoing community of practice, supported by the Todd Foundation and hosted at Hive11 Co-working with Seeds of Change. For me personally, this workshop marked a significant threshold: years of being most at home behind the camera, and then choosing to step in front of it, to teach and facilitate from lived experience rather than simply document someone else's. Let’s do more of these in Aotearoa NZ and beyond!
The Human CV (2025 series)
In 2025, I served as co-producer and cinematographer for The Human CV, a long-form video interview series created by my partner Jen Stevie exploring the soft skills, values, and lived wisdom of twenty changemakers across Aotearoa New Zealand. From a traditional Māori energy healer, Colombian-born food entrepreneur, wellness advocator, educator, life coach, accountant, and community organisers, each conversation went well beyond titles and credentials to ask something deeper: who are you really, and what do you actually stand for?
Behind the camera and in the editing studio, I was responsible for every frame these guests trusted us with. And as the first person Jen interviewed for the series, I also had to sit in the chair myself and answer the same questions. That experience of holding space for twenty people's honest self-examination while being asked to do the same changed how I listen, how I ask questions, and how I understand what it means to show up whole. It deepened my conviction that the most powerful stories are never about what someone has achieved, but about what they have had the courage to become.
Below are 6 of interviews I’ve had the privilege to take part in their creation. All of the Human CV interviews can be watch here.
Conscious Impact Nepal (2015-2021)
These videos are a treasure of time, devotion, and collaboration.
Of all the work I have produced across 16 years of visual storytelling, the films and short videos made for Conscious Impact in rural Nepal sit closest to my heart. Conscious Impact was born days after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake of April 2015, when a small group of people chose to stay in the epicentre rather than leave, and slowly built something extraordinary with the community of Takure in Sindhupalchowk district. I arrived not long after, and over six years as the organisation's community storytelling lead, I lived the work I was documenting: the compressed earth bricks pressed by hand to rebuild homes, the coffee nurseries taking root in the terraced hillsides, the local Nepali staff who chose to stay in their village because, for the first time, meaningful work existed there. My job was to translate all of that into stories that would move people on the other side of the world to give, to show up, to care. These short films are my best attempt at that translation in that time. They are much more than simply fundraising assets; they are human portraits of a community choosing resilience and dignity on their own terms (narrative sovereignty), and of an organisation humble enough to co-lead with them. Whatever I have learned about patience, about listening before lifting a camera, about earning the right to tell someone's story, I learned it in those years in Nepal. The fundraising campaigns those films supported have kept Conscious Impact running for over a decade. That is the measure of impact I want every piece of work I make to reach for.
Earthbag Dome Build
By 2019, Conscious Impact had trained more than 200 volunteers and local Nepali community members in earthbag construction across years of post-earthquake rebuilding, and they were ready to formalise that knowledge into an official ten-day certification course. Superadobe is a simple, strong, and deeply affordable technique that uses the earth beneath your feet as its primary material, ideal for rural Himalayan communities rebuilding on limited means. This film documents that first training: hands in the soil, bags stacked into the rising curve of a dome, local and international participants learning something they could take home and build with. After years of documenting the work at Conscious Impact, being present for this felt like watching emergency response become living, teachable knowledge.
Coffee Cultivation
This short film centres on Narayan Bhattarai, a farmer and long-term community partner at Conscious Impact, speaking in Nepali about what the coffee programme has meant for his family, the farming cooperative, and the land itself. Before the programme, most families in Takure were selling subsistence crops for barely enough to cover basic needs. A few years on, those same families were harvesting high-elevation Arabica coffee destined for roasters in Kathmandu. Narayan's testimony carries something that donor reports cannot: the quiet pride of a person who tended his land, took a risk on something new, and watched it take root.
Six years embedded in a post-earthquake community in Nepal. A donor community that kept the work alive for over a decade. This is what storytelling as service to me.
Shorter Form and Other Work
Memorable projects between 2022-2024 in Aotearoa NZ, Montana, and México.
Radical Truth Cards
Radical Truth Cards are a conversation tool created by Mo, Arya, and their team out of Lisbon and Berlin, designed to open the door to deeper listening, unspoken honesty, and the kind of presence that actually transforms a room. In January 2023, during my time on the coast of Oaxaca in México, I was invited into an intimate afternoon gathering on the Pacific coast as the cards were being launched into the world: a small group of friends and strangers, sitting together in the warmth of Mazunte, drawing cards, sharing stories, and watching something quiet and real open up between people who had only just met. I filmed it all, and I also kept the cameras running and jumped in to participate. While these shorts are a promotional product, they serve to document what the cards are meant to do: holding space for what needs to be said.
Iza Thomson
Wandering Earth Builder
Some of the most important stories are the ones happening quietly in someone's hands. Iza Thomson is a nomadic earth builder, educator, and artisan who travels Aotearoa and beyond running hands-on workshops that invite people to build with the land rather than against it. Her work spans cob, clay plaster, earthbag, and sculpted earthen art, and sits at the intersection of ecological restoration, decolonisation of the building industry, and deep community reconnection. This short film was an opportunity to document not just what Iza does, but why it matters: the way working with raw earth materials shifts something in people, returning a sense of belonging and responsibility to the natural world that modern construction has quietly eroded. In 90 seconds, the goal was to let her presence, her philosophy, and her craft and our shared afternoon speak for themselves.
Daniel Healing Arts
Daniel Wendt is a somatic bodywork teacher and practitioner who has spent 18 years developing a deeply attuned approach to fascia, breath, and the body's psycho-emotional landscape, running week-long immersive training courses for practitioners and curious beginners across Europe and Latin America. His Level 1 training in Mazunte, on Mexico's southern Pacific coast, draws people from around the world into the kind of learning that is equal parts technical and transformative. I filmed this video during my time in Mazunte in January 2023, weaving together participant testimonials with the warmth and texture of the place itself: the light, the ocean, the intimacy of a small group of people discovering what it means to really listen with their hands. When the people in your film are visibly changed by what they have just experienced, the job is simply to get out of the way and let that show.
Feathered Pipe Ranch
Since 1975, Feathered Pipe Ranch has been welcoming people to its corner of the northern Rocky Mountains outside Helena, Montana, offering week-long retreats in yoga, meditation, Ayurveda, and conscious living guided by some of the world's most celebrated teachers and wisdom holders. It is described on their own website as a place between awe and ahhh, which is about as accurate a two-word summary as you could hope for. This montage film is an attempt to translate that feeling into moving image: the alpine light, the laughter around shared meals, the stillness of people who have genuinely unplugged, the particular quality of community that forms when strangers spend a week together doing inner work in a beautiful place. No interview, no narration, simply the silence and serenity of the ranch, the mountains, and the felt peace.
Let’s Work Together
