4:MINUTE.MEDIA
The first twenty-four years were a rustbuster.
That's the word athletes use for the first race after the off-season where you shake off the rust. Ninety‑nine countries, two decades of films and photographs, and everything I set out to do — and I’d still call it the warmup.
4:Minute.Media is working and running faster than it ever has.
THE NAME
WHAT IS WITH THE COLON AND THE PERIOD, ANYWAY? IT'S A STOPWATCH.
Everybody got faster. So did we.
Runners didn’t quit when the barrier fell. They got better equipment and trained harder. That is exactly what we did.
I ran on a track scholarship at the University of Kansas. Four minutes was what we all wanted — the line between good and rare. I chased it for years and got very close but never broke it, and for a long time that was fine, because almost nobody did.
Recently the times started falling like rocks. Carbon plates and foam changed what a shoe does. Threshold training changed what a week looks like. Bicarb supercharged the last lap. High school boys run under four now, several a year. It has lost its luster.
None of that is cheating and none of it is sad. It is what progress looks like. But the number I named a company after stopped meaning what it meant, and I noticed. So I went and made it mean something else.
The same thing happened to this industry. An iconic image used to be rare. Now everyone has the tools, and the socials are full of them. Moving a room is no longer the hard part. So we took what we learned, adapted, and got better.
WHAT'S BEEN UPGRADED
Better access. Deeper bench. More it can do.
Everything that made this company good is still here. Four things got added.
We shoot for every use now, not just the night it screens. The room, the follow-up, the one-to-one conversation, the board update, the year-end. Same days in the field, a year of material instead of one night's.
I'm in the room before the shot list is made. I sit with the chief executive or the board and work out what this has to accomplish before anyone scouts a location. That used to be somebody else's call and the footage lived or died on it.
We print at architectural scale. Archival editions, hand-proofed, and whole installations made for the wall they hang on. A new line, and it's already in buildings.
We stay past delivery. We stand up the thing that keeps using what we made, train your team on it, and stay until it runs without us. So next year you build on this one instead of starting from zero. That's growth, compounded.
WHAT'S BEEN BUILT
99 countries
Most of them on somebody else's worst day
$200-400 million
Estimated commitments at major-donor events whose films I worked on
300 million
Viewers of a single film during the 2010 World Cup
TIME
Among the class of "Person of the Year" Ebola Fighters, Liberia, 2014
WHERE THE WORK HAS RUN
CNN · Good Morning America · USA Today · The Seattle Times · The Washington Times (cover)
SMITHSONIAN · Fast Company · Food & Wine · Science Magazine · GOOD · The Daily Beast · TED (main stage)
A DIFFERENT SEAT
Same bus. I just moved forward a row or two.
While I was making EDDIE, an idea about seats on a bus stuck with me. Not whether you have one. Whether you're in the right one. I spent twenty-four years in a seat I chose in my twenties, and I did everything in it I hoped to do and more. Heck, I even wrote a book about it.
I didn’t give that seat up. I added one next to it — beside the person deciding what happens next: a CEO, a board, a founder aching for growth. I still carry a camera. I'm just no longer hired only to point it.
Changing seats cost me nothing. The craft came with me. So did the crew.
THE LATEST
THE FILM I'VE BEEN QUOTING
FEATURED FILM
EDDIE
An ordinary man built a sports network and ended up changing how a lot of people think about leadership. He agreed to the film on one condition: that we show the decisions he got wrong. Keeping the spotlight off him and on the lesson was the job.
Feature documentary · 85 min · 2025
GO DEEPER INTO 4MM
FULL ARCHIVES AND EXAMPLES PLUS THE SHERIDAN GALLERY
Global nonprofit, justice, commercial, travel
Documentary, nonprofit, events
The Sheridan Gallery and printmaking
EITHER DOOR
Hire the camera. Or hire the judgment behind it.
If you need the iconic image or the film made, that has not changed and it is not going to. My bench and I are ready, and we can be on the ground almost anywhere in the world inside a week.
If what you actually need is to find out why the last one didn’t turn into anything, that is the other conversation. Most people end up wanting both.