What I'm doing
Updated April 2026 · Adelaide, Australia
Inspired by Derek Sivers' /now concept - what you might tell a friend you're catching up with.
Just launched. I've joined as Co-Director of The Australian AI Film Awards - the first national awards program for AI filmmakers and creators in Australia.
I've spent the last two years inside AI filmmaking as a practitioner - making work, learning the tools, developing a feel for the medium. What I kept noticing was that extraordinary creative work was being made by Australian creators with nowhere to take it. No peer group, no recognition, no industry context.
This is the thing I've been quietly building toward. Everything I've learned running SouthStart - how to build a stage, how to design for community, how to create the conditions for an emerging scene to find itself - applied to the AI creative space I've been working inside.
Brisbane. August 26. Part of Something Digital / Something Fest. Awards, masterclasses, panels. Entries opening soon.
Eight years in. 2026 sold out. Three days across the city with a 14-piece samba band leading the way.
Derek Sivers - six years out of the public eye - made the case for radical humanness as the competitive advantage in an AI world. Peter Helliar, asked what comedy brings to founding a startup, answered without hesitation: "Delusion."
The content matters, but the real architecture is everything around it - the long lunches, the 10-minute walks between venues, the collisions you didn't plan for. Eight years of designing for the in-between. Already building 2027.
Still making something every day. The daily AI film practice that started in 2024 has evolved into WYRLD - a world-building framework for the generative age. Tools and systems for building rich, consistent creative universes with AI as the instrument, not the author.
The film work continues alongside it. Solara was a finalist in Runway's GEN:48. The output is the proof of concept for everything else - the awards, the talks, the way I think about what AI creativity actually is.
A double album, now on Spotify. Songs written and recorded remotely between Toronto and New York, 2015-2017. Music I made in a different chapter that I'm only now putting into the world.
Speaking. Creative direction. AI strategy. AI Film Awards partnerships. Conversations with people building interesting things - especially in Australia.