Audience strategy / Website / Brand identity
Vulcan Productions
What if every story made the others stronger?
When I joined Vulcan Productions, I was asked to solve a puzzle. The company created award-winning films and experiences about some of the world's most pressing challenges. Each had its own creative identity, audience, campaign, and ambition for impact. But those stories largely lived apart from one another. We built an audience around one production, then started over with the next. What if we could connect those stories, strengthen the relationships between them, and make each one more valuable to the others?
Vulcan Productions / Brand image teaser
The opportunity
More than a collection of campaigns.
Every new production or campaign meant building another expensive standalone website, launching another campaign, and developing another audience largely from scratch. For Vulcan, that meant duplicated effort and infrastructure. For audiences, it meant fragmented experiences that rarely revealed the breadth of Vulcan Productions' work.
I saw an opportunity to change that. We could give filmmakers the freedom to create distinct digital experiences while building a shared home for their work. We could connect stories across themes and issues, introduce audiences to projects they might never otherwise discover, and create opportunities for engagement that extended beyond a film's release.
The goal was continuity without conformity: shared tools for the people making the work, meaningful connections for the people encountering it, and a stronger relationship between Vulcan Productions and its audiences.
The digital foundation
One home. Many stories.
Working with A Hundred Years, we redesigned the Vulcan Productions website as a flexible, editorially and thematically driven publishing home that tied our films and campaigns together and allowed audiences to follow our work holistically.
Individual productions could have their own distinctive microsite experiences, with room for characters, context, screening information, partners, and ways to act. We could combine storytelling and actions from separate stories so they worked together across Vulcan Productions' interest areas, creating ties between projects.
The shared framework also addressed a practical problem: campaign teams could now build from reusable infrastructure rather than commission a separate bespoke website for every release.
The brand system
Consistency without conformity.
To help tie it all together visually, we needed an identity people could recognize without asking every filmmaker to adopt the same visual language. I developed practical guidelines for how Vulcan Productions would appear across its website, campaigns, marketing materials, and motion work, with room for each film to remain itself.
The guidelines weren't simply rules for a logo. They gave teams common guardrails, helping individual projects feel part of a larger creative organization.
The stories between the stories
Give people a reason to return.
A shared home was only useful if there was something meaningful for audiences to discover and return for between major film releases. We began exploring a broader editorial model: original short-form storytelling, emerging media, and new ways to sustain conversations around the people and issues behind the productions.
I built a small, quick-turn internal production team to focus on creating short-form videos to tell the stories between the stories. Seeds was the first tangible step. We produced four short documentaries and began demonstrating how independent stories could contribute to a larger conversation.
From engagement to action
What if we connected more than our own stories?
The same challenge existed well beyond Vulcan Productions. Across films, nonprofits, campaigns, and cause-driven websites, people were discovering important stories and opportunities to act, but those experiences often remained isolated. A person who cared about one issue might never find the other organizations working toward a similar goal.
Social Action Machine (SAM) took the idea behind our internal ecosystem and imagined it at a much wider scale. Through embeddable petitions and other actions, different organizations could connect their campaigns to a shared participation platform, helping audiences discover related causes and stay engaged across websites rather than starting over each time.
We built and tested a working prototype. Its early results suggested the potential of a more connected approach to social action, even though the larger platform was never fully realized.
MVP sign-ups
4,751People signed up through the pilot.
Petition signatures
7,018Actions recorded in the prototype.
Beacon conversion
46%Reported overall conversion rate.
Results reported in the SAM MVP presentation, not a fully launched platform.
The unfinished idea
A foundation for something bigger.
The work was real. The larger ambition was still taking shape.
We built the website and brand system. Seeds began telling original stories. SAM tested a way to connect participation across organizations. The larger vision for a lasting, connected storytelling ecosystem was only beginning when Vulcan Productions' future changed following Paul Allen's death. What remained was a conviction that independent stories could become more powerful when the relationships around them were allowed to grow.
Vulcan Productions creative, filmmaking, campaign and digital teams · A Hundred Years · W3 Awards: Best in Show, Visual Appeal · Gold, Activism · Silver, Movies & Film