Andrew — Melbourne-based AI creative director with roots in commercial photography

A Scene

Your product or idea can be generated in any scene, in any home, in any country. Windows in the background, views of any vista. All of it photoreal, in limitless versions, available to anyone, including your competitors.

Until you want a new angle of the same scene, or to adjust the subject's location. Then your subject stops looking like your subject.

That's both the promise of AI and, when navigated without care, how I feel many brands will become synonymous with AI slop. Since February 2025, I’ve been learning everything I can about how it was built (starting with Attention Is All You Need), who it is built for and, most importantly, where it excels and where it falls apart.

So, if you're here for commercial photography, ignore the AI, although I'd still suggest watching my AI short film Mirage. If you're here for AI, the photography is proof of prior experience.

If you're here for both, we have some seriously good conversations ahead.

Where I come from

15+ years managing entire image pipelines for businesses, from concept to capture to final delivery. Whether it's an art-directed campaign launch shoot or a 500-product pipeline for a bi-yearly season launch across multiple departments and brands, the work meant stepping into existing workflows, pinpointing the pain points, and making changes, sometimes slow, often fast, that kept images consistent and made the workday a little easier for everyone involved. That included building file systems and transparent pipelines for components like editing, the things I most enjoy untangling. I can’t overstate how important it is to me to leave a business in a better state than I found it.

Over those years I spent a lot of time zoomed in further than anyone would ever look, working texture, detail and shadow until they matched the brief. Up close, nothing is ever perfect. What that time taught me is which flaws break an image and which ones no one will ever feel. With AI, every frame arrives with something wrong in it, so that judgement matters more than ever.

What I do now

Creative direction and end-to-end production for brands exploring AI as an idea multiplier, or piloting it alongside their existing output.

This is strategy in and around AI, as much as it is production.

I've dived deep so the brands I work with don't have to. What I've learnt goes into pipelines built bespoke to each brand, so building AI into your existing creative is as frictionless as possible. You deal with one person, me, from concept to handover.

What I don't do is generate a short film in 2 days with an AI agent running every aspect past the initial brief. But I can advise on the components that should matter if that is the goal.

So my entire focus is making sure your brand doesn't look like everyone else's. I have always called it brand mystique: everything a brand puts out works on its own, and as part of a larger, broader story. It's how you can tell someone cared, because somewhere along the line, they did. It mattered to me in traditional creative, and even more so now with AI, when the output is limitless.