The Valley Film Festival
What this engagement required.
The Valley Film Festival has programmed independent films in the San Fernando Valley for over two decades. The relationship with Kaiser Creative spans fifteen years, growing into a formal role as Filmmaker Coordinator and Manager of Alumni Relations. The work that followed covered podcast production, live programming, website development, and the operational infrastructure that ran the festival year to year.
VFF @ Cine Gear Expo
Cine Gear Expo is an annual film industry event drawing over 16,000 attendees to Los Angeles each year. The Valley Film Festival holds a booth there through an ongoing partnership, and the podcast was built around that presence as a natural gathering point for the festival's alumni, partners, and the broader filmmaking community already in the room.
The show was hosted by Aaron Matthew Kaiser, a natural evolution of the role he had held at the festival for years as a Q&A moderator. Six episodes were produced in a single-camera video interview format, with guests ranging from festival alumni to industry partners to the festival's own executive director, covering the breadth of what the VFF community looked like from the inside.
The show's branding and album art were designed alongside the podcast website, extending the visual identity into a dedicated home for the episodes and building a cohesive presence for the show across platforms.
VFF Filmmaker Chats
Before the Cine Gear podcast, there was a live interview series on Clubhouse during the platform's peak in 2021. Seven episodes aired across the year, co-hosted by Aaron Matthew Kaiser and festival executive director Tracey Adlai. The format was an audio-only live broadcast. Missing an episode meant missing it entirely. That was part of the draw.
The promotional assets led with the festival and the guest. VFF branding anchored each card, the guest was featured prominently, and host presence was included without competing for attention. The design made clear who the conversation was with and why it was worth showing up for.
Festival Database
The Airtable database began as a tool for managing the current year's filmmakers and grew into a 25-year archive of the festival's entire history. The core of the system was the relationship between the films and filmmakers tables, each connected to the other across every year of programming.
Every data point needed to run the festival was tracked in full: contact information, agreements, delivery assets, and screening schedules. The database also powered the filmmaker portal schedule, tracked comp ticket availability per screening, and logged awards against filmmaker profiles. Everything needed to run the festival lived in one place, and anything needed to act on it could be surfaced in moments.
The database became the operational backbone of the festival, consolidating what had previously lived across disconnected systems into something the team could actually move fast with.
Related Work
Doritos
Three spec ads for the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl competition. One aired nationally. One went to Cannes.
Leaving a Legacy
A Webflow site built to convert radio listeners into donors, with a Wized-powered checkout connecting Stripe and Airtable for dynamic giving and donor tracking.