with Martin Scorsese
Black Forest Labs
Black Forest Labs was quickly becoming one of the most influential companies in generative AI. As FLUX evolved, the team needed more than marketing. They needed a compelling narrative that could position the company, introduce new creative possibilities, and inspire filmmakers, designers, and artists to see AI differently.
Working closely with executives and the Black Forest Labs team, I helped shape that story through strategy, creative direction, and executive presentations that explored the future of the brand.
The Challenge
Every AI company was competing for attention using the same visual language: futuristic interfaces, glowing gradients, robots, and technical jargon.
Black Forest Labs believed something different.
They weren't building AI to replace creativity.
They were building tools that expanded it.
Our challenge wasn't simply introducing FLUX. It was creating a brand narrative that felt cinematic, imaginative, and unmistakably human.
Finding the Story
Before creating a single visual, we spent time understanding the people behind the technology.
Through conversations with Black Forest Labs and internal strategy sessions, we uncovered recurring themes that shaped every creative decision:
Creative freedom over automation
Storytelling over technology
Humanity over machinery
Cinema over software
Those ideas became the foundation for every presentation, campaign territory, and creative exploration that followed.
Step into the Forest
Technology may power the product. Imagination gives it purpose.
Black Forest Labs had already built extraordinary technology. The opportunity was to build a world around it. One that felt less like entering another AI platform and more like stepping into a place where ideas could take unexpected directions.
“Step Into the Forest” became an invitation into that world.
The forest gave the brand a powerful metaphor: a place of exploration, possibility, discovery, and the unknown. Rather than relying on the familiar visual language of artificial intelligence, the creative direction leaned into something more human. Curiosity.
It helped position Black Forest Labs not simply as a company building generative AI, but as a creative partner giving filmmakers, artists, designers, and storytellers new ways to explore what they could imagine.
The technology could generate the image.
The more interesting question was where your imagination might take it.
Building the World
One story. Multiple ways into it.
From brand positioning and campaign territories to film, social, out-of-home and executive presentations, we began translating the idea into a visual world designed to show what creative freedom with FLUX could actually feel like.
"The hardest part of directing is helping others see what you already do. Now, they can."
Shaping the Direction
My role was turning strategy into something people could see, understand, and believe in.
Working with executives, the creative team, and Black Forest Labs, I helped develop the visual territories, campaign concepts, mockups and design systems that brought the thinking to life.
Ideas moved quickly, from early exploration through multiple rounds of refinement, each iteration bringing the creative direction into sharper focus.
Executive Presentations
Every creative direction was developed through a series of executive presentations that balanced strategy with visual storytelling.
Across multiple iterations, ideas evolved from broad brand positioning into campaign concepts, advertising systems, video treatments, and launch-ready creative.
“You never really finish a film. You just stop. But what if you didn’t have to?”
Why It Matters
Great creative work rarely begins with visuals.
It begins by understanding what a company believes and finding the story that makes people care.
The strongest ideas didn't make the technology the hero. They made the creator the hero. We weren't simply asking people to understand what AI could do. We were asking them to imagine what they could do with it.
This project reinforced something I continue to believe:
The most meaningful creative work doesn't explain a product.
It reveals a point of view.
