I spent several years in finance. I was competent at it. I could read a room, build a pitch, and make numbers feel like a story worth following. But somewhere in the middle of presenting Emaar floor plans and Danube investment decks, I realised I was always more interested in why the visual made someone lean forward than in the return on investment behind it.
I’m a cinephile in the way that probably annoyed people around me. While everyone else was deciding if a film was good or bad, I was somewhere else entirely — in the sound design, the edit rhythm, the way a shot gets held three seconds longer than expected and what that does to something in your chest. I was analysing colour grading while people were debating plot. I was thinking about music placement while people were checking their phones.
That’s not a hobby. That’s a way of seeing.
I left finance because I couldn’t keep pretending that spreadsheets were the most interesting thing in the room when there was a whole world of cultural stories, brand narratives, and visual languages that nobody was reading carefully enough.
This corner of the internet is where I think out loud. Strategy, culture, visual obsessions, campaigns that moved me and campaigns that should have known better. If any of it makes you see something differently — a festival, a brand, a film, a season — then it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to.
— Adrija