Things we took apart, and how they held.

Problem

A farm that grows, mills and bags its own millet had a minute to convince a buyer, and a story that lives in three rooms rather than one. Most farm films solve that with a voiceover explaining what you are looking at.

Pieces

• One shooting day, the light chased rather than fought: field at the low sun, the silo, the mill floor, the bag closing.
• No narration. A single line of copy carries the cut, so the machinery keeps its own sound.
• Shot on a Canon 5D Mark II and cut in Premiere Pro. That camera's DSLR codec is heavily compressed 8-bit — it banding in skies, smears in shadow, and punishes any grade that asks much of it, so the colour work had to be gentle and deliberate rather than aggressive.
• Graded for the two places it would actually be seen — a trade-stand screen in daylight and a phone.

Put back together

A minute, three renditions, and nothing in it that needs explaining. Play it here at whatever size this window is — the page picks the file that fits.

Problem

A fundraising film is the easiest place in this trade to flatten people into need. The brief was the opposite: raise money without turning a hillside household into a statistic or a before-picture.

Pieces

• One household, one hillside, one day — rather than a montage of several places nobody remembers.
• Shot 4K on an iPhone 13 — the camera that was actually on the hillside. No second unit, no lighting truck, no permission to come back tomorrow.
• Graded in DaVinci Resolve, and this was the hard part of the job. A phone sensor hands you a heavily compressed, already-processed image: baked-in noise reduction and sharpening, crushed shadows, a narrow band of usable latitude, and skin tones the phone has quietly decided on for you. Recovering a neutral starting point before a single creative decision could be made took longer than the grade itself.
• Subtitled, because the people who would fund it and the people in it do not share a language.

Put back together

Two minutes that stay in one place long enough for a viewer to recognise someone. The work happening in shot is work, filmed as work — and nothing on screen announces that it was shot on a phone, which is the whole measure of the grade.

Problem

A song that needed pictures, and no budget for a shoot. What existed was documentary footage taken for another reason entirely — real streets, real people, none of it filmed to a beat.

Pieces

• The edit found the rhythm rather than imposing it: cuts landed where the footage already moved, not where the metronome said.
• Graded to one look so material shot days and cameras apart reads as a single piece.
• Three and a half minutes, which is the song's length and therefore the film's.

Put back together

Shown here at 480 and only 480 — that is the largest master that still exists, and the card says so rather than declaring sizes this studio cannot serve. Honest beats impressive.

Problem

Social apps are built for a city that speaks one language and then translated afterwards, which is why the third language always feels bolted on. Proxcimity is a studio product, not a client job — designed, built and run end to end here — so the decision could be made the other way round.

Pieces

• Trilingual from the first commit: English, Thai and Filipino, for a Bangkok and Manila audience.
• PostGIS on PostgreSQL does the proximity work in the database, where it belongs, rather than in a query the client can rewrite.
• Row-level security makes the boundary a property of the row, so a mistake in application code cannot hand someone another person's data.
• SvelteKit and TypeScript on top; Supabase underneath.

Put back together

The build is finished. The full write-up is held back until it launches — the address is live in the meantime.

Problem

One site, three people arriving with completely different questions: a sponsor deciding whether to give, a partner ministry deciding whether to apply, and a contractor checking what certification requires. Each needed a straight path, and none of them should have been made to read the other two.

Pieces

• A route per reader, so the answer is one or two pages in rather than buried in a single page trying to serve everybody.
• Self-contained static HTML with inline CSS and JS — no build step, and any page opens from a folder years from now.
• AVIF images and Cloudflare in front, because a good share of the audience is on a phone and mid-range data.
• No payment code on the site at all: giving hands off to the ministry's own processor.

Put back together

The site carries no card numbers, stores none, and cannot leak what it never holds. Being behind a CDN means a deploy is not live until the cache is purged — that step is written into the handover rather than remembered.

Problem

A nonprofit network working across Thailand and the Philippines had three things to say — a church home, a writing journal and an annual summit — and they had to read as one family rather than three websites that share a logo. No budget for a content system, and nobody on staff to run one if there had been.

Pieces

• Sixteen self-contained pages: inline CSS and JS, fonts served from the site's own folder, and no third-party request at all.
• Slug routers for articles, categories, products, sermons and episodes — adding a piece means editing a record list, not writing a page.
• Measured at a true 390 px with a purpose-built harness, because headless Chrome silently enforces a ~500 px minimum and lies about phone layout.
• A classic PHP WordPress theme mirrors the static site, built and then parked until the client wants an editor.

Put back together

Approved without a revision, and since September 2026 the client runs it themselves: Cloudflare hosting, updates pushed through GitHub, pages edited at a prompt. Built for Builders Community — the site, the brands and the content are theirs, not this studio's.

Problem

A studio site that claims a studio can take things apart and put them back is worth nothing. It has to do it, on the page, while you watch — and then still be readable by someone who cannot tolerate motion at all.

Pieces

• A motion engine with verbs — split, glitch, shards, scatter, boot — driven by attributes in the markup rather than a class for every effect.
• Off means off: the engine restores the original DOM rather than freezing a half-played animation, and the toggle is honoured before first paint.
• Two complete designs on one toggle: the dark stage and the paper letterhead, both from the same tokens, neither an afterthought.
• No framework, no build step, one blocking script at the end of the body.

Put back together

The Lab page opens the engine up and lets you run each verb by hand. That is the actual sales pitch: here is the mechanism, judge it.

Problem

An identity drawn for one shop usually breaks at the third: the mark was sized for one sign, the colours were mixed for one wall, and nothing was written down about which is which.

Pieces

• A mark that reads at a bag stamp and at a shopfront, tested at both before it was signed off.
• A wordmark set beside it rather than locked to it, so a second and third shop could use either.
• A print set specified for letterpress, where ink behaves differently than it does on screen.

Put back together

Three shops later it is still the same identity, which is the only test that counts.

Problem

Most small storefronts are a platform's default theme carrying a megabyte of script so that four pages can show eleven products. The phone pays for all of it, on the worst connection of anyone in the chain.

Pieces

• A static build served from the edge, so the first byte is a file and not a database query.
• A checkout measured at a true 390 px, thumb reach and tap targets included, rather than at a desktop window squeezed narrow.
• Images sized for the slot they land in, not scaled down by the browser after the download has already happened.

Put back together

The page that matters — the one with the buy button on it — is the fastest page on the site rather than the slowest.

Problem

A wide cinema cut cropped to a square is a film with its subject's head missing. Three screens is three edits, and pretending otherwise is how a good shoot becomes three mediocre posts.

Pieces

• Framed on the day for all three ratios, with the safe area known before the camera rolled rather than discovered in the edit.
• Three separate cuts: the long one for a room, the feed one that works muted, and nine seconds that survive being skipped.
• Sound finished in Logic for the long cut and re-balanced for a phone speaker, which is a different mix, not a quieter one.

Put back together

One shooting day paid for three finished pieces, each one composed for where it actually plays.

Problem

A mixed-use building in Southeast Asia: several unrelated tenants, one fibre line, and one consumer modem's Wi-Fi shared by all of them. No separation between the public guest network and the people paying rent, and nobody who could say which cable went where. If the one person who set it up left, the building's internet left with them.

Pieces

• A Cisco Meraki MX behind the ISP's fibre ONT; five VLANs — four tenants plus management — and one SSID per tenant.
• The guest network is treated as the least trusted thing in the building and gets its own VLAN; the management network is the one nobody else can see.
• Intrusion detection and content filtering where they earn their keep, with cloud management and client VPN for remote administration.
• Every console screen captured and reduced to one canonical data file — the single source every document is built from.

Put back together

The network is the smaller half of this job. The larger half is the documentation set, so the building's internet belongs to the building rather than to whoever configured it.

Problem

Hours of English-language video, a Thai audience, and cloud dubbing quoted at roughly three dollars a minute. “Good enough” was given a number before anything was built: about 93% of frontier quality — not perfection, but nothing that makes a listener wince.

Pieces

• Demucs separates the voice from music and room noise, so the music survives the dub.
• MLX Whisper transcribes with timestamps on Apple Silicon; a local model translates line by line, keeping the timing.
• F5-TTS-THAI clones a reference voice from a sample of twelve seconds or less and speaks each line.
• ffmpeg cuts long videos into roughly three-minute chunks at silent gaps and stitches the dubbed parts back together.
• One Python core drives all of it, with a resume flag so fixing one line never means re-running the film.

Put back together

Every box in that chain runs on the Mac already on the desk, so the per-minute cost is zero. A person still reads English and Thai side by side, and a line a person has approved is never quietly regenerated.

Problem

The mark was drawn in 2013 for a business card, and it held. The lettering around it did not: it was set to be noticed, which is exactly what stops working once a brand has to sit on a website, an invoice and a film's end frame at the same time.

Pieces

• The mark kept, not redrawn — the seam, the blade and the sail are the same shapes they were.
• Marcellus for the wordmark, Playfair for display: letters that can be read quickly and do not compete with the mark beside them.
• Orange demoted from a default to an event, with separate tones for display type and for small text so it stays legible on both the dark stage and the cream paper.

Put back together

The gradient bar from that 2013 card still runs across this site. Thirteen years is a reasonable test of whether a mark was right the first time.

Problem

A backup nobody has restored is a rumour. So is a recovery procedure written by the person who already knows the answer — it reads fine to them and stops being followable at the first step they thought was obvious.

Pieces

• Every backup restored onto a clean machine before it counted as a backup at all.
• The documentation set built from one canonical data file, so a changed credential or IP updates every page that mentions it rather than four of the five.
• Access and credentials first, then install, restore and recovery, then the full reference — the order someone needs them in at two in the morning, not the order they were built in.
• Generated to Word and PDF by script, so the guide cannot drift from the network it describes.

Put back together

The test was not whether it was accurate. It was whether somebody who had never seen the system could bring it back by reading.

Problem

A bilingual children's series, thirty-plus lessons, each needing the same ten deliverables in the same style. Made by hand, lesson thirty would have looked nothing like lesson one, and every teacher's tablet would have held a slightly different folder.

Pieces

• A master lesson document as the single source of truth for everything downstream.
• A grading pass that scores that master against a rubric before a single asset is generated from it.
• Generators for the deck, infographic, colouring pages and review sheets; text-to-speech for narration; artwork made with current image tools and finished by hand.
• A sync step that lands every file in the right lesson folder, named the way the classroom expects to find it.

Put back together

“Create lesson 31” is now one instruction. Quality is graded rather than assumed, and a fix made to a reviewed lesson is kept rather than overwritten on the next run. Produced pro bono.

Problem

Generated artwork gets you to eighty per cent in a minute and then stops. The last twenty per cent — hands, edges, the one detail that betrays it, a palette that matches the rest of the brand — is where the work actually is, and no amount of re-prompting gets there.

Pieces

• Image models for the first pass: composition, light and several options fast enough to throw most of them away.
• Brushwork over the top in Affinity for the parts a model cannot be talked into.
• Graded in Resolve alongside the film it sits next to, so the art and the footage share one look.

Put back together

A human pass at the end is not a courtesy here, it is the deliverable. The tools moved the starting line, not the finish.

Problem

A booking screen used by staff all day does need to be an icon on a phone. It does not need a store listing, a review queue, two native codebases, or a release cycle measured in days for a one-line fix.

Pieces

• Installs from the browser — the icon lands on the home screen and opens without browser chrome.
• A service worker keeps the shell and the day's data on the device, so a dead spot in the building is an inconvenience rather than a stop.
• Updates ship the moment they are deployed; there is nobody in between to approve them.

Put back together

One codebase, both platforms, no gatekeeper — and a one-line fix that is live in minutes.

Problem

Most of the questions a small team answers after hours have already been answered in a manual nobody reads. The usual fix is a chatbot that confidently invents the rest, which costs more trust than the wait ever did.

Pieces

• Answers drawn from the client's own manuals and documents rather than from the model's general knowledge.
• Run locally where the documents are sensitive, so the material never leaves the building to be answered.
• A handoff to a person built in from the start: not knowing is a supported answer, and the escalation is the feature.

Put back together

The repeat questions stop arriving at a person at eleven at night. The ones that genuinely need one still do.