David M. Crabtree

Creative director & creative technologist · London

I make the work. Then I build the machine that helps make it.

Fifteen years directing commercials and music films for Sony, Honda, Disney, and DC, and writing features for Sony, Screen Gems, and Lionsgate. For the last two, I have built and run a generative AI production system for my own work—and learned exactly where it helps, and where it quietly flattens everything.

Now

The tools are easy to buy. Getting them into production is the job.

Most creative teams have access to generative AI. Few have it working inside a real pipeline. The gap is rarely the software. It is the workflow around it: where the machine explores, where a person decides, what it costs, and how you stop fluent, empty output getting through to the client.

That gap is where I work. I sit with a creative team, learn how they actually make things, and build the workflows that make the tools stick.

AI multiplies the routes you can explore. It supplies no judgement and no taste. Any workflow that forgets this produces more work and worse ideas.

The system

Built for my own work. Used every day.

I would not let the tools flatten the writing, so I built the guardrails myself.

01The pipeline

More than twenty purpose-built tools across research, ideation, drafting, critique, and revision, plus two data services for market and relationship intelligence.

02Routing

Mechanical work—versioning, retrieval, formatting—runs on cheap or local models. Frontier models are kept for work that carries a voice. Cost is a design constraint, not an afterthought.

03Adversarial review

Agents argue a concept from opposed creative doctrines and a judge rules. The machine widens the options before anyone commits. A person chooses.

04Quality gates

Voice and substance checks that catch output which is correct, fluent, and empty—the failure every creative team fears from AI, treated as a design problem rather than a policy.

Directing

Clio-winning commercial, branded, and music work.

Concept through final cut: the Clio-winning Sony spot with John Legend, documentary-style branded work for DC Comics and Honda, short-form for Disney, and music films with the artists below. Executive producer of VEVO’s forty-episode Go Shows, a Webby honoree, and producer and editor for NBC’s online Olympics coverage in Rio and PyeongChang.

Artists

Nas · Kendrick Lamar · Trent Reznor · John Legend · Ellie Goulding · Florence and the Machine · J. Cole · Kid Cudi · Big Sean · Miguel · Selena Gomez · ScHoolboy Q · Foster the People · Weezer · One Direction

Brands

Sony · Honda · Disney · DC Comics · Chevy · Adidas · Jeep · Allstate · Coors · Corona · Dr Pepper · Vitaminwater · Sperry · Starburst · YouTube

Writing

Features on commission, written to someone else’s brief.

WGA screenwriter. Every script below was developed against notes from studio, producer, and director at once—which is to say, turning competing stakeholders into one plan.

  • LEFT SEATSurvival thriller starring Michelle Rodriguez and Richard Gere, now in post-production. Developed at Screen Gems/Sony with directors John Moore and Timur Bekmambetov.
  • OMEGAScience-fiction spec for Sony and Mandalay Pictures, with Simon McQuoid attached to direct.
  • INHERIT THE EARTHSony/Columbia. Adaptation of the graphic novel Zombies vs. Robots for director Kornél Mundruczó.
  • FOR ALL TIMELionsgate, with Dan Lin producing. Originally titled Time Tweakers; my first feature sale.
  • PHASICSold to Mandalay Pictures.
  • PHANTOM FOURTwo original screenplays for David S. Goyer’s company.

Press & recognition

Contact

[email protected]

LinkedIn London · USC School of Cinematic Arts