STEF is a freelance director working with global sports, powersports, and wellness brands.


Sport, powersports, active lifestyle.
Creating films that survive being taken apart.




I'm hired to turn ideas into films that provoke something. That means knowing my audience, and audience is everything. I need to know who they are, how to speak to them, and what they value.

There’s another critical thing I need to know about them. Where they are when they see the work. But that I can't control. They'll find it out of order, out of context, and wedged between things I didn't make.

That's what I mean by creating films that survive being taken apart.







You can’t choose the first frame anymore.



The cutting room floor was where great shots went to die because the job was telling the story in 15 seconds. Now it's telling the story in 15 pieces.

That changes the structure, not the story.

So I break the story into as many entry points as I can. Moments, beats, visual cues. Any one of them can be a first touch, which means every piece is the story.





One shoot produces a hero film designed to come apart. The pieces aren't B-roll. They're lit and covered like the film.

I don't find these pieces in the edit. I plan them in prep and shoot them with the same crew, the same light, the same day.

Here are three examples.


How can I tell the 
story in 15 pieces?






















Under Armour came with heat gear and an athlete. Georgia Ellenwood, Canadian heptathlete and Olympian. One session produced the hero film and everything that fed back to it. Training moments, movement details, product beats, loops and stills, sequenced out over weeks so the feed kept returning to her. Every piece worked alone. Every piece pointed back to the film.


























 






























Off road culture runs on revs, rips and rooster tails. That's the foundation of the 30-second hero, shot in the desert, and of everything that came off it. Single-shot clips, quick montages, loops, the tossed-off details of a day off grid. Every piece worked alone. Every piece pointed back to the film.




























  






































Beyond the Build traces Ski-Doo's two-stroke and four-stroke lineage over five episodes for a die-hard technical audience. Over forty minutes of long form. Each episode is a mechanically minded brand film that produced dozens of planned snippets, excerpts, trailers and teasers, sequenced over weeks to keep sending the audience back to each new episode. Every fragment raised recognition for the one before it. This is the approach at full scale.





















Where the Ski-Doo DNA begins. The racing two-stroke that started it all, the engineers who built it, and the sound that still defines the brand.











   


Dependability as a design feature. Bringing a four-stroke to trail riding meant winning over an audience raised on racing, and the engineers had to prove it before the riders would believe it.




The same platform taken into a zero gravity environment. Deep powder doesn't hold you up, so the sled has to float and turn on the rider's weight instead of the ground. Engineering for a surface that isn't there.















   
             



The REV Gen4 platform. A new chassis, a new riding position, and a trail sled that handled like nothing before it. The kind of change that reset the category.





The MXZ sled and the riders it made. Blair Morgan, Tyler Aklestad and Elias Ishoel. Three champions, three ways of winning, one sled.






















Directing films that survive being taken apart.



I'm always thinking about the best way to tell a story to the people who'll actually see it. That's what this is. Built for how people find things now.

The projects are different. The way I shoot them isn't.

The film gets made, and the world around it gets made at the same time. Stories designed to come in parts, but still connect back together.