How making movies made me a better engineer
People keep treating films and engineering as separate crafts. What making movies since 2019 did to the way I build software, from blocking a scene to cutting a feature.
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7 films
directed, written, edited, shot or scored
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2019
my first credit, Strangers, as cinematographer and composer
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8 hats
the departments on a small short, from writer to editor
Key facts
- Argument
- Making films and building systems take the same muscle: make the scene work for the people in it.
- From
- Seven film credits since 2019, from cinematographer on Strangers to director of Among Monsters.
- Day job
- Building production AI systems at a dental implant company.
- Lessons
- Block before you light, listen to the script supervisor, and cut to the bone.
- Takeaway
- Treat each project like a small film: a spec before the schema and a cut that keeps getting shorter.
I make movies. I write screenplays, direct, edit, and occasionally compose music. I also build production AI systems at a dental implant company. People keep treating those two as separate. They aren’t.
The customer is the cast. The system is the scene. The job is to make the scene work for them.
The credit list, so we’re talking about specifics:
| Year | Project | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Among Monsters (IMDb) | Director, Writer, Editor, Color, Music |
| upcoming | Extraordinary Lives | Director, Writer |
| upcoming | Pupa | Writer |
| 2025 | Solstice | Editor |
| 2024 | Swechcha | Editor |
| 2022 | Tiger Man | Director, Writer, Editor |
| 2019 | Strangers | Cinematographer, Music |
I’m cutting Among Monsters between work weeks right now.
A film set looks like an engineering room
A small short has a director, a writer, a DP, a sound mixer, a gaffer, a costumer, an art department and an editor. Each one speaks a different vocabulary and defines “done” differently. The director’s job is to translate the scene into the eight languages on set.
It’s the same room I walk into at work. A treatment coordinator who has quoted full arch implant cases for years doesn’t care how I store a frozen price. They care whether the system gives them the same number they quoted last month. The controller doesn’t care about my retry decorator. They care whether the bank file lands in the cash flow sheet before the cutoff.
Specialists. None of them wrong. One person whose job is to make it add up.
Things I do at a keyboard that I learned on set
Block before you light. On set you walk the actors through the scene before anyone touches a lamp. In code I write the decision record before I touch the schema.
Listen to the script supervisor. Lowest credit on the call sheet, highest practical authority on the day. At work that’s the person who does the job every day. Someone on the accounting team told me the bank import was grabbing half downloaded files, and that is why the import now stops and asks.
Cut to the bone. Editing a film is mostly removing, and the cuts that hurt are usually the right ones. Code is the same. Less is harder than more.
Show one cut to the right person. My first rough cut goes to someone from the audience. I don’t ask for notes. I watch them watch it. The first demo of a feature goes to the person who will use it every day, and I would rather watch them fumble through the tooth chart in silence than read a thread about it.
A scene works or it doesn’t. Films get judged on whether the scene works. A polished sequence of bad scenes is a polished bad film. I’m relentless about whether the shipped thing solved the problem the customer brought.
What this does to the engineering portfolio
The systems I ship survive contact with non engineers. The odd rules in the dashboard, the estimator and the consult pipeline came out of arguments with the people who use them.
I can work alone in scopes that would normally need a team. A director on a small short is also the writer, the editor, the colourist, the producer’s bad cop and the actor’s good cop. I came to engineering already used to wearing eight hats.
The postmortem is part of the work. I rewatch every film a year later with a list of what didn’t work and why. My systems keep a backlog of deferred items with the trigger to revisit each one. Same instinct: name the loose ends out loud.
The version a hiring manager wants
If you’re hiring an engineer who can sit with a customer until the system you ship is the system they needed, that’s the work I want. Treat every project like a small film: a spec before the schema, department heads who all get heard, a scene that has to work, and a cut that gets shorter every week until it’s the right length.
Two crafts, same muscle.
