I was in a theater, watching a film the way I always do, taking the scenes apart while they played. A song came on and gave me goosebumps. I sat there thinking about how much I love this, and how I have never once wanted to make one.

That stayed with me for a while. I love film. Nothing about it feels like a lane I'm avoiding. I've just never felt pulled toward making one, and that night I worked out why. What I want isn't the movie. It's what the movie does to a person. I want someone to be inside that feeling, not looking at it from a seat.

I keep coming back to two kinds of immersion. The first is embodied. Cosplay. Disney World. Physically stepping into a world someone else designed and walking around in it. The second is imaginative and shared, like D&D, where a group builds the world together in real time and nobody sits back and watches. Both are more active than a movie.

That gap between receiving a story and being inside one is the design space. Games, AR, spatial experiences. Anything where the person isn't just taking the story in. They're in it, or they're shaping it. It's why I work with a camera that turns the room you're standing in into the set.

Movies aren't the problem. Some nights you want to relax and have a story handed to you, and film does that better than anything else. I want both to exist. I'm just not the one who wants to build that kind.

The same night I landed on a definition of story I can actually use. A story is a journey between a starting point and an ending one. Someone starts here, something happens, they end up there. If a person is inside it, that journey is the one they walk.

One smaller thing stuck with me, and I want to keep it. What made the scenes feel real wasn't the big moments. It was specific, consistent detail. A teenage character's room with a BTS poster on the wall. A detail like that only exists if someone thought about who this person is, not just what they're doing in this scene.

Immersion lives in the poster on the wall, not the explosion on the screen.

When I build, the default version of a detail shows up first. The generic one. The job is to notice it and replace it with the one that's true to the world. That is the same instinct as noticing the default and not shipping it, applied to a room, a character, a prop.

I still love a good seat in a dark theater. I'd just rather build the room.