A spot fails in one of two places: the performance doesn't land, or the look doesn't hold up.
Dialogue, character, and celebrity spots — food, automotive, insurance, telecom, financial, healthcare, tech, retail. Anywhere the spot depends on a person, not a product spinning against a white cyc.
By the time the camera rolls, a spot has already passed through a lot of hands. The agency has an idea it believes in. The client has objectives it needs hit. The creatives have a joke that has to survive execution intact. And all of it lands on one actor, who has to absorb the whole stack and then be spontaneous about it, on the ninth take, while twenty people watch and nobody laughs because everyone's heard it forty times.
That interface — where the idea becomes a human being saying something out loud — is the part I actually know.
I know it because I've stood there. Over a hundred commercials, on the mark, with the boom overhead and the client watching from video village. I know what a note sounds like when it's been translated three times before it reaches the performer, and I know the difference between a direction an actor can act on and one they have to decode first. Most adjustments on a set aren't performance problems. They're language problems.
So I give the note in the form it can actually be used. Not "more energy" — the specific thing that produces more energy. That's not a soft skill, it's a schedule. It's the difference between finding it on take three and hunting for it until the light goes.
That's half of it. The other half is post, and I don't mean I've been in the room while it happened. I've been a working editor for thirty years, including in-house — which means I've sat on the receiving end of other directors' footage and had to make a spot out of it. You learn fast whose coverage cuts and whose doesn't. You learn which "we'll fix it in post" actually gets fixed, and which one becomes your problem at 2 a.m. I shoot like someone who's going to have to cut it, because I have been that person several hundred times.
The VFX and finishing side is the same story. Trouble Is My Business is a period noir built on an independent budget — green screen, matte work, and compositing that had to hold up on a feature screen. I cut it and I worked the shots. So I know what a plate needs to be before we roll on it, not after, and I know which fixes survive a client review and which fall apart under one.
That knowledge is risk reduction, not a flourish. I know which setups eat a day. I know which promises not to make in the room. I can talk to a DP, a gaffer, and a compositor in their own language, the same way I talk to an actor in theirs. Concepts get protected by knowing what's achievable before the shoot day, not by discovering it at 4 p.m. with the client standing behind the monitor.
Neither language is a second one for me. Plenty of directors can light a beautiful frame with nobody convincing in it. Plenty can pull a real performance and hand you something that looks like everything else. The spot needs both, and nothing gets lost on the way between them.
Comedy is where I learned it. Comic timing is just precision about when a human lands a beat, and there's no faking whether it worked — either the room moves or it doesn't. I founded the sketch troupe McFwap, and the surviving members of Monty Python personally invited me to direct their unproduced sketches. But the skill underneath isn't gags. It's the same thing a testimonial needs, or a dialogue spot, or thirty seconds of a family talking about their insurance: someone being believable while a lot of people watch. That travels across every category on the list above.
Agencies have been hiring me for years: TBWA\Chiat\Day, Wieden+Kennedy, Leo Burnett, BBDO, McCann Erickson, and Saatchi & Saatchi, for clients including Dell, Microsoft, Boomi, and Delta Scientific. Alongside that I've built a filmmaking career — Bosch: Legacy, Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, network work for HBO, FX, CBS, and Fox. I wrote, directed, and starred in the feature noir Trouble Is My Business, and I'm currently directing the sci-fi comedy feature LeapFrog, with Anna Faris attached, through my company Lumen Actus Productions.
