Hi! I'm Josiah. I've spent the last decade on hit TV shows, commercials for startups and global brands, and some of the highest-performing YouTube channels ever made. I'm a strategy and ideas guy who guides agencies, animators, editors and designers as they bring great creative work to life.
Dallas wanted Johnny Cash's "God's Gonna Cut You Down," and I was all in. You're about to see a different side of Jesus — he's not pulling any punches, and that song is the perfect fit for the beginning of the end.
I creative directed shot and soundbite selection, then spearheaded the ten cutdowns that ran from it across television and social.
Easily our best trailer work yet, and the internet agreed.
The trailer had to accomplish two things at once: deliver the action and adventure of survival television, and tease the emotional stakes — moments of fear and doubt — felt by the cast of The Chosen. I knew we needed both for a successful crossover.
Premieres 9 August on Prime Video.
"Can you stop time?" Ha. Very funny. "I'm serious — what can you make in forty-five minutes?"
Rain in Rio had just collapsed an already ambitious schedule for branded graphics projected onto the 98-foot Christ the Redeemer statue. The new deadline meant rethinking the production strategy entirely: we built a sequence out of a proven graphics system, extended it into the projection format, and used motion design to carry it across the statue. In the time we had, the team on the ground half a world away got everything they needed.
The marketing team needed to triple video output for the year. The obvious move was to hire more staff or contractors. I proposed scaling through a social-media post-production agency instead.
Then I jumped in the trenches with them — walking through the brand, the creative decisions we make and the reasoning behind each one, so they could replicate our work without us in the room. Within two weeks their output was indistinguishable from our internal team's.
A senior creative lead at the studio told me the entire team was trying to reverse-engineer how a brand-new agency was hitting the mark that fast. It was something they'd never managed before.
Another executive: "You've unlocked something here, Josiah. Now the video team is scalable."
More than 4x the typical return on a higher-education fundraising campaign.
The whole thing rested on one insight: alumni would engage if they saw the university president in a way they never had before — funny, self-aware, in on the joke.
Orphaned Courage · FilmFuel · 2016–18
Ask any independent filmmaker what's hardest and they'll say the same thing: raising the money to make their movie.
I cracked the code on my own films. Make it for a cause, and local businesses want to help — they get their logo associated with goodwill in their own community.
Orphaned Courage screened to a sold-out red carpet premiere, with the profits going to an adoption assistance fund. Because of the film, every 18 to 36 months in perpetuity, a new child is placed into a loving home of their own.
Then I wrote the book on it. FilmFuel is a full funding methodology for independent filmmakers — released exclusively through a charity event to more than 16,000 creatives, raising $40,000 for Rise Against Hunger, Action Against Hunger, Village Impact, Street Child and Children International along the way.
"Josiah's advice could be a crucial cog in the wheel for those of us who never imagined producing our own projects. The model fills a need in more ways than one and could change the course of indie and even tentpole productions." — Beverly Nault, Phoenix Screenwriters Association
The theme was identity in exile. Everything was stripped from Joseph — his coat, his name, his family, his freedom. He's rebranded as an Egyptian: he looks the part and speaks the part, yet underneath it all, is still Hebrew. He navigates several identities as an outsider in all of them.
I built the creative concept around that, contended for it, oversaw the animation studio that brought it to life. More to come.
The brief was to over-deliver. Fans had come out to see the film in theaters and we wanted an unforgettable "thank you" moment.
So in response, we had the cast of The Chosen deliver comedic guidelines for behaving yourself at the movies, in King James English. No texting. No talking. No tomfoolery. Thus sayeth the Lord.
"The introduction of the 10 or 15 commandments was freaking awesome and hilarious!"
"the 10 commandments was absolutely hilarious."
"So funny! My kids were quoting it after we left the theater."
From social media, opening weekend
Showdown. The Spy Who Fed Me. More to the Story. Plus a repeatable format layer — Whisper Challenge, Try Not to Laugh, Never Have I Ever, Guess Who, First-Century Foods.
I own the creative across every channel the show has — YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn. Video, static, copy, and the consistency between them.
Reach at this scale isn't an accident and it isn't expensive. It's knowing which second the hook has to land on, and building the thing backwards from there.
Lacrosse sticks are a design problem. They're long, they don't scale, they're illegible at small sizes, and they leave a weird amount of dead space around them — on a phone home screen you can't tell what you're looking at. So I abstracted the most recognizable part of the game, the net and the ball, and let a bold typeface and a tight palette do the rest of the work.
Venture-backed. Co-founder and co-inventor on two US patents pending.
AI startups in the creative industry have become known for one thing: replacing creatives. I'm bullish on human creativity, and I think the real opportunity is in giving human creatives superpowers.
For our visual identity, I wanted to show a productive connection between the human and the digital.
The hand, drawn in a single line and always coming from above — human touch, intuition, creativity. The imperfect, irreplaceable part. The cursor — mechanical precision, speed, intelligence. The digital part. The spark — the ignition, the click, the moment creative intention becomes action.
Where they meet: loosely inspired by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam — human creativity at the helm, AI capability in service beneath it. A partnership in balance that changes how great work gets made.
Over a billion organic video views for influencers and high-profile startups like Duolingo, Eventbrite and Insurify.
I wanted something bold and attention-getting. The pointing hand doesn't sit next to the wordmark — it is the M. So the mark does the thing the name says: it makes you look, then tells you that's what just happened. Same thinking behind the name: clever, and immediately true the moment you read it.
Creative directed the trailer.
A documentary portrait of Jordan Walker Ross, from interviews, archival material and stills. Watch →
Best Crime Short (Gold) · Academy Award-qualifying Official Selection · Best Short Film · Best Editing · Critic's Choice.
Lead editor through the channel's growth past 10 million subscribers and 800 million views.
Film festival panellist, workshop leader.
Hey — I'm Josiah, a German-born creative and entrepreneur.
I was the tenth person in the room at The Chosen, back when it was a scrappy startup, and I got a front-row seat to the whole thing becoming a global studio. That turned out to be an absolute masterclass in entrepreneurship, in building an audience, and in making a respected and recognizable brand.
Today I'm creative lead on our trailers, teasers and everything social, and I've creative directed streaming and theatrical marketing across three Prime originals: The Chosen, Joseph of Egypt, and The Chosen in the Wild with Bear Grylls.
I'm also co-founder of Krew Technologies, where we're building real-time operational intelligence for film and television production. Two US patents pending, venture-backed, and built on the belief that AI should make creative people sharper rather than replace them.
Before all of that I built Made You Look Media and ran it for eight years — over a billion organic views for influencers and startups like Duolingo, Eventbrite and Insurify. In the same stretch I wrote and produced my own films, got one into theaters, and used it to fund adoptions. My work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
I live with my wife and two daughters in the southeastern United States and am currently perfecting my dad jokes. Always looking for new ways to impact people by doing what I love.
"Josiah, everything you put your hands to ends up elevating our entire company."Dallas Jenkins, creator and director of The Chosen
