The long version
OVER BLACK:
Troy, voice-over:
Thirty years, and underneath it the job’s been the same: get the technology working by the time people are counting on it. I’ve done that on stages, in data centres, in startups and on film sets. Here’s how it went, in order.
Act 1: Backstage, 1995 to 2012
FADE IN:
Scene 1. Interior. The theatre, from the stalls. Day.
SUPER: “An invented theatre, modelled and lit for this site.”
An empty Edwardian playhouse, seen from a seat in row K, off the centre line.
Working lights only: flat white from the grid onto a bare stage. The proscenium frames it, the borders a band across the top. Seat backs along the bottom of frame. Over the pass door, house right, a green exit sign. No one in yet.
Troy, voice-over:
I started at Brisbane’s Tivoli Theatre in 1995, went full time in 1996, and by 1999 I was production stage manager for RAW Company, touring shows around the country and into a Broadway season in New York.
DISSOLVE TO:
Scene 2. Interior. The theatre, from the stalls. Evening.
Same seat, same frame. The working lights are out and the house lights are up, warm on the walls and the seats. On stage, the preset: low, cool light across the bare deck from the wings.
Troy, voice-over:
A stage manager calls the show from the prompt corner - a marked-up script, a headset full of departments, and a clock the audience never sees. As production stage manager I also owned everything that happened before that: the schedules, the budget, and the final call on every technical and people problem between the first design meeting and opening night. Then each night I sat at the desk and ran it - lights, sound, automation, flys, cast entrances, the lot.
Seventeen years of that teaches you things no process document will: that deadlines don’t move, that a calm voice on comms beats a loud one, and that the show is only ever as good as the people standing in the wings with you.
DISSOLVE TO:
Scene 3. Interior. The theatre, from the stalls. Night.
Same frame. Everything is out but the ghost light: a bare bulb in a cage on a stand, down centre, and its warm pool on the deck. The exit sign and the step lights stay on.
Troy, voice-over:
When the industry started running short of people who could do the job, I ran Theatre Training Australia’s programs and trained the next lot of technical directors to take the chair.
End of act 1.
Act 2: Infrastructure, 2003 to 2015
Scene 4. Interior. The theatre, from the stalls. Night.
The ghost light, as we left it.
PULL BACK TO REVEAL:
Scene 5. Interior. A data hall. Continuous.
SUPER: “An invented data hall.”
The theatre shrinks to a lit rectangle and keeps going. It is inside a server rack, in a gap thirteen units high where the blanking panels are out. A warm pool and a green exit sign, between the rails.
The rack is one of a long row, seen square-on. Its mesh door stands open; the rest are shut. Status lights, small and steady, mostly green, a few amber. A yellow fibre runner overhead, its drops coming down to the racks. A red smoke-sampling pipe above that. Only the night lighting is on.
Troy, voice-over:
While the tours ran I was also building infrastructure. At WebCentral I led the team that designed, built and ran one of the first dedicated data centre facilities in the southern hemisphere. Thousands of businesses and government departments put the systems they couldn’t afford to lose in our hands, and our job was to keep them running while the country slept.
A theatre goes dark between shows. A data centre doesn’t - there’s no interval and no second house tomorrow to make up for a rough night, and when it breaks it breaks in front of everybody at once. I spent 2006 in Tokyo on Nokia’s flagship product team, and for the better part of a decade I ran my own production and hosting company alongside the touring.
PULL BACK TO REVEAL:
Scene 6. Interior. A radio studio. Continuous.
SUPER: “An invented radio studio.”
The hall is what a studio window looks onto: double glazing, the two panes not quite parallel.
On this side, a broadcast desk under two dim downlights. A mic on a spring arm over the console, headphones on a hook, the playout screen on its arm. A studio clock over the desk. The ON AIR light is off. The station is on automation.
Troy, voice-over:
In 2014, as CTO of Moment Media, I built radio, television and live venues and stood up the X Cast IPTV platform - which is where broadcast, infrastructure and live performance finally became one job for me.
CUT TO BLACK.
End of act 2.
Act 3: Startups & health, 2016 to 2021
OVER BLACK:
Troy, voice-over:
In 2016 I moved to San Francisco and co-founded Really. The idea was that the way a person speaks and writes changes as their mind changes, and that those changes show up in language long before a clinic would catch them. We tracked people’s language over time and trained models to find the earliest signs of neurodegeneration. It pulled in serious partners - global pharmaceutical companies, one of the largest retailers in the world - and I ran product and took the company out to raise, in front of family offices and philanthropic funds most founders never get near. The answer was the same in every room: too early. I came home with a clear view of how investors weigh a technical promise, and why good work can still get a no.
Back in Sydney I spent three years as CTO of Pioneera, applying the same idea to the working day. We read the language teams use without thinking about it and flagged stress and burnout early - no surveys, and no human ever reading a private message. Both companies rested on the same idea: the words people use carry the signal well before the crisis arrives. Health keeps finding me, and I haven’t said no to it yet.
Neither company was “AI” in the way the word gets used now, and both came years before AI became a standard board question. They were applied machine learning on difficult human language - messy speech, writing that changes over time, workplace messages, weak signals, privacy constraints, false positives, and consequences for real people. That is the useful part of ML experience: knowing what the model can say, what it cannot say, and what it will cost when people believe it too much.
End of act 3.
Act 4: Screen, 2021 to 2022
FADE IN:
Scene 7. Interior. The radio studio. Night.
The studio as we left it: the desk, the clock, the window onto the hall.
PULL BACK TO REVEAL:
Scene 8. Interior. An LED volume. Continuous.
SUPER: “An invented LED volume.”
The studio is a set: three walls standing on a matte stage floor, open on this side, the flats braced and weighted. Its window looks onto a curved LED wall, and the wall is running the hall. From here it is one hall, through the window and around the set, with no seam. In one rack, very small, the theatre is at ghost light.
LED ceiling panels hang angled from truss. Two soft panels on stands, sandbagged, either side of the set, both on low. A length of dolly track in the foreground. No one on the floor.
Troy, voice-over:
As CTO of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School I led the technical, production and facilities teams through building one of the first LED volume stages at any film school. The brief was nine months and a fixed budget, and we opened on both. I stood in the dark and watched students light a scene inside a world that used to need a backlot and a fortune.
CUT TO:
Scene 9. Interior. The LED volume, from the brain bar. Continuous.
The same volume from the brain bar, off to one side. Three empty chairs face the wall across a desk of dark monitors. A rack of render nodes at the edge of frame, status lights green.
The cinema camera on its dolly, no one on it, its cable run back past us. The set from the side: braces and stage weights on the backs of the flats. Across the wall runs a hard vertical edge, and on either side of it the rows of racks don’t meet. It only lines up from the lens.
Troy, voice-over:
That was when virtual production stopped being an interesting technology and became the next decade for me. It can take the tools that only ever belonged to the big studios and put them in the hands of anyone with a story worth telling.
Production City is where I’m building that at full scale, and it’s the biggest thing I’ve taken on. It isn’t one stage - it’s a campus in development, planned for seven locations around the world, and it covers the whole problem: the land, the design and construction, the sound stages, the LED volumes, the broadcast theatres, and the film and television deals that keep them busy. The build is measured in years, and it’s already underway.
End of act 4.
Act 5: Building & advising, Now
Scene 10. Interior. The LED volume, from the brain bar. Continuous.
Nothing moves. The wall runs the hall.
Troy, voice-over:
I’m CEO of Production City while its funding round closes. Away from the campus I still write code most weeks, always on something personal. Conspect keeps my hand in on broadcast tooling - I build it because I like the problem. r6y came out of a serious health scare of my own this year: I wanted a gentle way to track my recovery and report back to the people looking after me, couldn’t find one, so I built it.
Kin came out of caring for my mother through her neurodegeneration. It’s the tool I wish our family and her carers had when it counted.
I advise as well. Founders, boards and investors bring me the technical problems with real money riding on the answer - the architecture nobody senior understands, the hire they can’t assess, the vendor who has them over a barrel, the thing that wakes them at two in the morning.
I have pitched San Francisco investors from the founder’s side of the table and answered to boards and government ministers as a CTO, so I know which questions a director should be asking, and I know a straight answer when I hear one.
Thirty years in, the job hasn’t changed much: there’s a date, there are people counting on it, and the system has to work. How I work with people is on the home page.
SUPER: “Every room in this story was modelled and lit for this site. None of them is a real place.”
FADE OUT.
The end.