A Personal Note
Hi. I’m the creator and writer behind the Flying Eagle universe.
If you’ve made it this far, I genuinely appreciate it. FEP has been a slow-burn passion project. Something I keep returning to and expanding because I can’t not. It’s how I think, process, and make sense of things.
So, who am I…?
I grew up inventing scenes with friends and recording them on our parents’ VHS cameras. In high school, I gravitated toward photography and video production. In college, I went to film school right as the industry was shifting from analog to digital. Our first classes were strict. Shoot and hand-edit 16mm film only. No shortcuts. No undo. Every foot of film cost money, so every second mattered. It was painstaking and formative, and it taught discipline before convenience.
I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Art and that turned into a career in production. I worked in video production, then music videos, films, and commercials for global brands. I spent years as a visual effects artist. Tip: learn to rotoscope, but never tell anyone you are good at it.
Along the way, I was also in a small indie band. We wrote our own music, analog style. We recorded, released albums on a small label, and toured. It was another version of the same obsession. Building something honest with other people and hoping it connected. Eventually, life shifted. Careers changed. Music faded into the background, as it often does.
Which brings me to now…
You’ve probably noticed that Flying Eagle Productions is being made using AI tools, specifically for the episodic visual work. Building a story world, its characters, history, and emotional logic takes time, energy, and iteration, and this is something I’m developing alongside a full life and a full-time career. I’ve found that using generative models to tell this story and build on characters I created has been both challenging and creatively rewarding.
After spending real time inside this medium, my view is simple. AI is a tool. Tools don’t make art. People do. What it does do is democratize production, much like earlier shifts did. Consumer cameras that could shoot 24fps gave aspiring filmmakers access to a film look. Final Cut Pro put a million-dollar editing suite into basements and bedrooms. Photoshop caused panic in the early ’90s for similar reasons. Each time, the fear was the same. That ease would erase craft.
It didn’t. It just changed who was allowed to participate.
From my perspective, as someone who built a career in traditional art and production, I view blanket, artist-led anti-AI rhetoric as misplaced when it treats tools as intent rather than focusing on the choices of the person using them.
I don’t dismiss the concern around how technology reshapes industries. It does remove some paths while creating others. That tension is real and uncomfortable. But human history is full of these moments. Arguably since the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture. There is no clean or perfect way to summarize progress while you are living inside it.
One unexpected outcome of building FEP is that it pulled me back into music.
Using a mix of AI tools, manual lyric writing, stem building, arranging, and mastering, I found that same creative pull again. It didn’t feel like replacing musicianship. It felt like collaborating with constraints. I ended up releasing an EP tied to Season One of Flying Eagle Productions. Full-length songs grown out of fragments that appear in the episodes. It felt less like starting over and more like reconnecting with a part of myself that had been waiting patiently.
What I know for sure is this. Creating the visual and musical language of FEP has made me feel like I’m back in film school. The constant iteration. The limits. The frustration of hallucinations. The challenge of communicating emotion or story in ten seconds. All of it echoes those early VHS experiments with friends. Trying, failing, adjusting, and trying again.
It’s difficult. And it’s a little bit magical.
Art has never been about purity. It’s never been about rules. It copies, absorbs, mutates, and responds. Think of Warhol. Think of sampling. Think of collage. Art moves forward or it risks becoming preservation instead of expression.
At its core, art is obsession. Taking something familiar, shaped by everything that came before, and pushing it just far enough that someone else notices. And maybe feels something.
Thank you for stepping into a small corner of the Flying Eagle universe. It truly means more than I can say.