Pocket Pictures is a creative production company based in San Francisco & Brooklyn
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Salt-of-the-earth seasoned vets
Located in San Francisco and Brooklyn, our work spans commercials, short films and branded content for clients who care about craft. Every project starts with the question: what's the most compelling way to tell this story?
Word on the street
"Pocket Pictures is an extraordinary team of people with amazing ideas, incredible skills, and beautiful hearts. Our multiple projects together have always been such a breeze and filled with laughter, culminating in an incredibly beautiful end product."
Stella Kim
Senior Designer, Samsung Electronics
"They are very creative and have an eye for small touches that elevate the resulting piece beyond what was imagined."
Vicky Fairhurst
Executive Producer, Cogs & Marvel
"They are not just a production company, but partners that collaborate with you to help bring your vision to life, with a process that is seamless and a willingness to pivot as challenges and changes occur."
Harry Yu
Head of Brand Design, Figure Technologies
Overview
Pocket Pictures was brought on to create the introduction film for Memo: the helpful home robot designed to take on the repetitive tasks that eat up your day.
Challenge
Memo is a genuinely novel object. Not a Roomba, not a sci-fi humanoid — something in between, and something new. The challenge was to introduce it without leaning on either of those reference points. We needed Memo to feel warm, capable, and real — without overselling what it can do or underselling what it means for the consumer.
Overview
When a robotics company is building the future of the home, the visuals can't feel speculative. They have to feel real.
That was the mandate behind our work with Sunday.ai — to create a suite of launch films that didn't just explain the product, but proved it. No overpromising. Just a home robot named Memo performing real tasks in real environments.
The company was launching a new generation of domestic assistants and needed a film that could introduce them as the kind of thing you'd want in your home.
Challenge
Robotics advertising tends to default to spectacle — speed demos, precision montages, feature callouts. We wanted to invert that entirely. The challenge was to slow everything down and let the machines breathe.
We shot over four days across residential locations in San Francisco and the Marin headlands. Every frame was designed to feel like a Sunday morning.
Approach
Director Jamie Niebuhr worked closely with Sunday's design team to choreograph movement sequences that felt instinctive rather than programmed. The score lets the edit breathe to the music rather than the other way around.
Post was handled by editor Noe Chavez and handed off to RoastnPost for color grading that pulled warm amber tones from the practical light sources and a subtle grain structure that softened the mechanical precision of the subjects without hiding it.
Overview
Figure makes it possible to tap your home's equity in days. We built the film around the moment before a decision, when wanting something just within reach. A renovation half-imagined. A business not yet started. The film doesn't explain the product, it highlights the dreams behind every project.
Challenge
The brief was simple and hard: make a financial product feel like something people actually want.
Director Jamie Niebuhr worked with the Figure team to agree on a shared visual language before a shot list was written.
Approach
Build a home set, keep things playful and execute precicely for the match frames and feeling to land.
Overview
Kilo the Kid, a 2022 SXSW premiere, is a short film recounting Kilo Madera's transition from a street-fighting teenager, to accepting the responsibility of fatherhood and fulfilling his dream of becoming a professional boxer.
Director Jack Boston brought the project to Pocket Pictures as a fully developed script. We came on as producing partners and co-financed the production and post.
Challenge
Working with real people meant throwing out the standard production playbook. Schedules were loose by design. Blocking was suggested, never fixed. The camera followed rather than led.
The biggest challenge was maintaining that looseness through post — resisting the urge to over-cut, to explain, to tighten everything into legibility. Some of the best moments in the film are the ones that don't resolve.
Approach
We shot on 16mm for the first three days and digital for the last three, ultimately using a blend of both in the final cut. The grain of the film stock gave the early sequences a memory-like quality that matched the story's interior logic.
Sound design was built from field recordings made in the neighborhood during pre-production — ice cream trucks, chain-link fences, the specific acoustics of that particular block. The film sounds like the place it's about.
Overview
THE TRAILS BEFORE US follows 17-year-old Nigel James, a Diné mountain biker, as he hosts the first Enduro race in the Navajo Nation. Through revitalizing livestock and wildlife trails on his grandparents' land, Nigel and a new generation of riders honor the connection to their land, community, and culture.
Pocket Pictures developed the project with Fritz, approaching it as a long-form portrait as much as a branded film. The result is something harder to categorize — and better for it.
Approach
The team shot over five days across three locations, working with a small crew of five. We worked with our branded partner, Specialized, to produce behind the scenes, allowing Fritz's vision to come to life without it feeling like a branded collaboration.
Pulling in our partners at Forager.tv, we called on exceptional doc editor Nico Frank to mold the film into the beautiful piece it is today. The score was composed and performed by William Ryan Fritch, who had worked with Fritz on previous projects. It sits low in the mix, more texture than foreground, which was exactly what the images needed.
Awards & Festivals
Overview
Specialized has spent decades on the cutting edge of cycling. When they approched us about introducing Globe, their first foray into electric bikes, they didn't want another product demo, they wanted a fresh take on introducing a product's features and benefits. They wanted something that said this isn't just for cyclists, this is for everyone. Pocket Pictures was brought on to create the launch film for Globe, a bike designed to make riding feel effortless, joyful, and a little bit like cheating (in the best way).
Challenge
The tension at the heart of the brief: how do you launch an electric bike for a brand whose identity is built on sweat and performance? Globe wasn't for the Specialized die-hards. It was for the person who wanted to ride to the farmer's market, commute across the bridge, or just feel the wind without arriving soaked. We had to honor the brand's credibility while opening the door to a completely new audience — without alienating either.
Approach
We built the film around moments of small joy. The grin when the assist kicks in on a hill you thought was going to beat you. The ease of locking up outside a coffee shop. The city seen at 15mph instead of from behind glass. Director Luke Tate and the team shot across San Francisco over two days, leaning into the city's hills as a natural product demo — letting the bike prove itself without ever feeling like a pitch.
Overview
The second music video from Ovrkast.'s album, Try Again. Shot during lockdown in Oakland, California and Brooklyn, New York on a mix of digital and 16mm film. Featured on Rolling Stone, Beyond the Short, Hypebeast, Booooooom, Bay Made, "Face" was named one of Rolling Stone's Best Rap Videos of 2020.
Overview
LOVE POEM is an ode to Richard Brautigan's "Love Poem," recordings from the album, "Listening to Richard Brautigan," released in 1969. It's a series of intimate portraits placing people with the recordings. Director David Freemas brings his subtle and somewhat satiric sensibility to this short film.
Overview
Made for SF Pride 2021. The personal stories and reflections of this year's Grand Marshals come together to tell the story of the Pride journey on both an individual and a collective level, with an interpretive dance interwoven throughout to represent the historically unheard voices and personal struggles of the LGBTQI+ community.
Challenge
Pride films face a particular pressure: they have to hold both celebration and testimony at the same time. Joy and grief. Visibility and the long history of invisibility that makes visibility matter.
Approach
Director Crista Garcia's approach was to never let one swallow the other. The Grand Marshals speak plainly and personally — no speechifying, no performance of pride for the camera. And threaded throughout, a dancer whose movement carries what words sometimes can't. The result is a film that accumulates — each story adding to the last until the collective weight of it lands somewhere unexpected.
Overview
Chad Douglas is an NYC-based BMX athlete. Shot over Covid lockdown, we leaned into WIP's remote trust in our vision and Chad's flexibilty to work independently with a small team.
Challenge
Collaborating between a brand and partner in a way that portrays both honestly.
Approach
Filming on location in NYC streets and rooftops always presents it's own challenges. We leaned in to the raw, gritty nature and verité of Chad showing us his moves.
Overview
Mark Rober has built one of the most devoted audiences on the internet by turning engineering into entertainment. When Google tapped him to show what Pixel can do in the real world, they also tapped us to make sure the film felt like Mark, and not an ad. Pocket Pictures directed the production, working with Rober to build a piece that lived inside his world rather than interrupting it.
Challenge
Celebrity integrations live or die by authenticity. Rober's audience is sharp — they can smell a forced endorsement from a mile away. Everything about the shoot had to feel native to the way he actually works: curious, obsessive, a little chaotic, always building toward a payoff.
Overview
Chris was riding in a car with his family to grab a late lunch on a beautiful day in Gatlinburg, TN. Unfamiliar with the area, they came upon a fork in the road and suddenly were involved in a car accident. Luckily nobody was injured, and thanks to car crash detection* on Chris's Google Pixel, his phone prompted him to call emergency services.
Challenge
Real-person testimonial work has one cardinal rule: don't make it feel like a testimonial. Chris's story is genuinely moving, and the product genuinely helped him. The job was to get out of the way and let that be true on screen without the slick production sheen that would make a viewer tune out.
Approach
Director Jon Bunning and the Google creative team operated remotely while David Freemas and PP shot on location in Tennessee, returning to the actual road where the accident happened. The film stays close to Chris and his family, letting the emotional reality of the moment carry the product message rather than the other way around.
Overview
A music video for Stoney Creation's track from the album "If It Resonates..." — a piece built around movement, stillness, and the space between the two.
Dancers
Aziza Nussipov & Remone Ireland
Overview
Goodfire is building the tools researchers and engineers need to understand what's happening inside AI models. We wanted this anthem film to be straight-forward and make the work feel as consequential as it is.
Challenge
Interpretability research doesn't lend itself to obvious visuals. There's no dramatic moment, no single invention to hold up. The challenge was translating the weight of the work — the idea that understanding AI from the inside might be one of the most important things anyone is doing right now — into something you could feel in under two minutes.
Approach
We shot inside Goodfire's office, leaning into the texture of real work: screens, conversations, the quiet focus of people thinking hard about hard problems. Woven with found footage, the film builds toward something that feels less like a company video and more like a statement of purpose.
Overview
An anthem piece for CPRL and it's faculty that highlights the complicated educational-based work they do.
Challenge
Filming in real classroom environments is always a challenge. Between schedules and locations, Director David Freemas was able to work with the CPRL team to produce a crafted, polished piece that visually highlights the language-heavy work CPRL does.
Overview
Everett Noel started making knives when he was 13 and has spent the past 6 years honing his craft. After graduating high school he built a knife shop out of an old trailer and traveled around California as a nomadic artisan. Captured on location in the wild, we ran around with Everett as he sharpened and shaped his pieces in the wild.