A Letter from
Brad Feeser
Topic:
Collaborating
To anyone who has gone deep in their world and started wondering what's just outside it...
Want to collaborate?
Send me a message.
I don't have the answers. I want to be honest about that up front. This isn't a manifesto from someone who has figured it out. It's a letter from someone who has been at this for over fifteen years and is still more excited by the questions than anything else.
Here's what I keep coming back to: finding new ways to tell a story is the most interesting creative problem I know. Not story itself. The container. The platform, the medium, the canvas. What happens when you take the same human truth and put it somewhere unexpected? What does it do to the person on the other end? That question is what I keep chasing, and it keeps moving.
I'm not a generalist looking for variety. I'm someone who has developed real instincts across a lot of different forms. And I've learned that the people most hungry for that kind of thinking are usually the ones who have gone very deep in one world and hit a wall they can't see around from the inside.
Over the years I've chased it into some unexpected places.
Documentary film, Branded campaigns, A backpack, A handle, A puppet, Podcasting, Photography, Gaussian Splats, Generative AI, & Illustration
Not because I couldn't commit to one thing. Because the question kept leading me somewhere new. Video is the core of my work. It's how I've built a business, earned the trust of clients, and spent most of my waking hours. But it's only one container. And I've never been able to convince myself it's the only one worth exploring.
Sometimes the story is obvious and fed to audiences. Other times, story is found in a product that exudes ideas only those who use it will ever understand.
That second kind of story is the one that keeps me up at night. The one that doesn't announce itself. The one that lives in the object, the space, the texture of an experience, and only reveals itself to the people who actually show up and pay attention. I think that kind of storytelling is some of the most powerful work being done right now, and I also think it's the most under-explored.
The problem, as a freelancer, is that you spend a lot of time experimenting in a vacuum. You make something unexpected, you watch people react to it, you learn something and then you go back to your desk alone. There's no one to think alongside. No one who's been asking the same questions from a different direction.
That's what this is about. I've been thinking a lot about where storytelling matters most. The fields where the craft isn't just interesting but genuinely consequential. And I keep coming back to six worlds:
THE WORLDS I KEEP THINKING ABOUT
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Documentary & long-form narrative
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Branded & commercial storytelling
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Nonprofit & social impact
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AI & emerging media
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Civic & public affairs
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Immersive & IRL experience
What strikes me is how rarely these worlds talk to each other. The documentary filmmaker and the brand strategist are solving almost identical problems and almost never compare notes. The civic communicator and the immersive experience designer are both asking how to make someone feel like a story belongs to them. And working in complete isolation from one another.
I want to be in those conversations. Not as an expert arriving with answers. As someone who has spent a long time developing instincts across enough of these worlds to maybe be useful. And who is genuinely hungry to learn from people who have gone deeper in their own lane than I ever have.
If you're in one of these worlds and you've ever felt like your storytelling has hit a ceiling — not because the work isn't good, but because you're missing a perspective you can't find inside your own field — that's who this letter is for. I'm not looking for clients. I'm not pitching anything. I'm looking for people who are deep in their craft and curious what it might look like through a different lens.
With genuine curiosity,
Brad
Founder, Hearty Films