Dominic Smith

I never could pick just one thing.

I went to film school, then started out as a graphic designer at VH1. From there I drifted into web development and became the sort of person who has strong opinions about CSS (I still do; please don't ask). In 2014 I swung back round to video, and that's been the main event ever since: Emmy-winning documentaries, animation and brand films for The New York Times, PBS NOVA, Scientific American, Snapchat and Skydio, mostly about things that are hard to see, like AI, medicine and very old trees.

I co-founded Smith Robinson, my multimedia studio, and was art director, cinematographer and motion-graphics artist on the Emmy-winning "In Event of Moon Disaster", a deepfake of Nixon we made with MIT to warn people about synthetic media before everyone's uncle was sharing it. I've directed Emmy-nominated films for The New York Times and Scientific American, led the Times' COVID-19 ventilator-triage coverage, and pointed cameras at self-flying robots in active wildfire zones and on military sites.

The useful thing about having done all the jobs is that nothing gets lost in translation. The person who shot the film also animated the diagrams, wrote the music and designed the website, so the whole thing looks and feels like one idea instead of five vendors and a group email. And when a project is too big for one person, I've built production teams from scratch, three times: freelancers, post pipelines and all the unglamorous plumbing that gets things finished.

When I'm not working, I'm usually out doing something slightly ridiculous with a camera along for the ride. I've cycled across the United States, then from Los Angeles all the way to Rio de Janeiro (ridetorio.com, which, naturally, I also designed). I tried to rollerski across Norway, which became Slow Rollers up in the work section, and rode an electric skateboard down the Pacific coast during the pandemic (that's Endless Coast). The rest of the time I'm kiteboarding, skateboarding, playing piano, or raising two daughters, which is its own kind of expedition, with less sleep.

• Premiere Pro
• After Effects
• DaVinci Resolve
• Cinema 4D
• Unreal Engine 5
• Blender / Maya
• RED & Arri
• Drone · Skydio / DJI
• Color & Sound
• Generative AI
• Web Design
• HTML / CSS / JS
• React
• Team Leadership