The chef who cooks with fire

Chad Colby made his name at Chi Spacca, the meat-and-hearth room in Nancy Silverton's Mozza group, where he became known as a charcuterie master. Antico is his own place — rustic Italian built around a hand-cranked rotisserie and a wood fire: golden focaccia, house-made pastas, whole-animal charcuterie.

We shot it as a portrait, not a promo — the hands, the heat, the patience behind a plate. The restaurant has since landed on the LA Times' 101 Best and in the Michelin Guide.

Three companies. Three continents.

Amazon Ads wanted to show the human side of the marketplace — real founders building real businesses on the platform. We answered with a documentary series: CRBN in California, KAZI in Uganda, and BINIBI across borders, each company told over three chapters with the pacing and craft of a short film rather than an ad.

One visual language held the season together. Clean H.264 masters led the web cut, with ProRes backups and captioned duplicates delivered but kept off the front end — plus a full social matrix of two versions, three durations, and three aspect ratios for every company.

KAZI Goods — Kampala, Uganda

Handwoven baskets made by artisan weavers, sold globally on Amazon.

The three chapters trace the whole arc: The Weavers, where native grass becomes a globally celebrated craft; The Market, following the founders through international supply chains; and The Future, as KAZI expands its artisan network from Kampala to the world — proving handmade can scale without losing its soul.

BINIBI — Cultural identity, worn

Children's clothing that celebrates who kids are, shipped to dozens of countries through Amazon.

Origins introduces the first-generation founders and the conviction behind the brand; Scale captures the discipline of growing from a home operation without losing what made it special; Legacy looks ahead to new collections, new markets, and the next generation who'll grow up wearing something made with intention.

The finished BINIBI film:

CRBN — California, USA

The highest-performance paddle-sport equipment on the market, growing fast on Amazon.

The Paddle follows product development from material science to court testing; The Players goes courtside with sponsored athletes in one of America's fastest-growing sports; The Growth charts CRBN's rise from a California startup to a nationally recognized brand — niche excellence meeting mainstream demand.

The finished CRBN film:

Three founders, one series

The Spark is a branded documentary series for Amazon Ads about the moment a business begins — the conviction that makes a founder start. Three films, each a feature in miniature: a founder, a product, and the reason it had to exist.

EQUO — Vietnam

A sustainable consumer-goods brand selling on Amazon, shot on location in Vietnam with the visual language of a travel documentary — lush, textured, alive.

IYA Foods — Chicago

IYA Foods makes Nigerian pantry staples accessible to the American kitchen — the story of founder Adaeze Asala, her heritage, her product, and the kitchen where it all began.

NYSSA — Women's Health

NYSSA makes postpartum recovery products for women — intimate, necessary, and long overdue. The kind of work we take on when a brand is trying to change how people talk about something important.

The secret is in the soil

In the guise of an Apple documentary, we meet Ken Yamamoto — an 83-year-old reclusive botanist and self-styled 'sound gardener' who has quietly cultivated Apple's headphones since the first iPod in 2001. Straight-faced, lovingly shot, completely absurd.

It ran as a Funny or Die original and got picked up across the Apple blogs as one of the year's most charming April Fools'.

Built vertical, built for the feed

A run of social-first spots for the EQS, framed 9:16 so the car — and Drew Brees — never leave the frame on a phone. One campaign, cut into a set of aligned vertical films that play as a wall.

When the drones delivered

For the December 2023 release of Illumination's Migration, Amazon Ads tied the film's 'expand your horizons' theme to Prime Air. A fourth-grade teacher and her class were flown to Amazon's Prime Air facility in College Station, Texas, where drones — wrapped, first-to-market, in Migration livery — delivered a classroom of supplies and an all-expenses trip to Jamaica, mirroring the ducks' own journey in the film.

IEHP is one of the country's largest nonprofit public health plans — roughly 1.5 million Medi-Cal and Medicare members across Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The film leans into real feeling over feature lists: the Inland Empire's own faces, told so members see a reflection of themselves.

PIH Health runs hospitals, physician groups, and urgent care across the Whittier, Downey, and greater Los Angeles area. Two spots, one idea — the reassurance of care that's genuinely close by: a brand film and an urgent-care cut.