Creative Record
Immersive hospitality. Storyworld design. AI-forward business development.
I help businesses create better customer experiences through thoughtful service, atmosphere, menus, and storytelling. My approach combines filmmaking, creative direction, and hands-on hospitality experience to turn ideas into practical improvements.
From a confusing menu to an unwelcoming arrival, small details shape how people experience your business. I help you find what is getting in the way, develop what makes you distinctive, and decide what to improve first.
Rooted in hospitality. Relevant to any business that serves people.
Essays on immersive hospitality, AI-forward business, storyworld design, and the film craft underneath it all.
Films and practical ideas about hospitality, filmmaking, creativity, and the experiences businesses create.
@jlbunnell
Years across film, brand, hospitality & experience design
Video projects delivered
Returning clients
Creative & hospitality ventures founded
Year-old Vermont beverage story revived
Entertainment cocktail & soda lounge opened and operated
Interactive web apps and game prototypes
Podcasts, branded campaigns, live events & immersive experiences
Everything I build sits inside one of these three areas, and the useful work tends to happen where they overlap.
Designing environments and service systems around how people feel, participate, and remember, not just around what they order. Story, atmosphere, ritual, recognition, and surprise treated with the same care as the drink in front of the guest.
Practical AI applied inside businesses I actually operate. Prototyping, decision support, staff training, operational systems, content and creative development. Automate the invisible. Humanize the visible.
Using filmmaking, characters, mythology, environmental storytelling, live entertainment, and interactive technology to turn ordinary businesses into worlds people can participate in.
A working model I use for thinking about how a hospitality experience actually lands on a guest, from the first frame they read to the last feeling they carry out the door.
What world am I entering?
Before a guest reads the menu or hears the music, they read the room. The story is the frame everything else hangs on: the era, the point of view, the reason this place exists.
What do I see, hear, smell, touch, taste?
Light temperature. Music curated for the moment, not the shift. Textures under a hand. The smell of ginger from the bar. Sensory detail is where atmosphere becomes real.
What can I participate in, not just observe?
A ritual to perform, a card to hold, a menu that behaves like an artifact, a game to play, a stranger to meet. Participation is what separates being a spectator from being inside the story.
Does this experience acknowledge me as an individual?
Names remembered. Regulars noticed. Small acts of specific attention. The moment a guest realizes they aren't a transaction is the moment the experience begins to belong to them.
How do I feel when I leave compared with when I arrived?
The only measurement that actually matters. Not satisfaction. Change. A guest carrying a slightly different mood, story, or self-image out the door is the point of the whole system.
Working framework, in active use at Venetian Soda Lounge and other projects. Not a finished theory. A tool I sharpen every week.
For collaboration, immersive hospitality projects, AI-forward business development, creative leadership, speaking, or something interesting you're building, the channel is open.
