RetroMotion Creative is Justin Bunnell's cinematic video production and brand storytelling studio, producing campaigns and branded content for regional businesses, nonprofits, industrial companies, arts organizations, and mission-driven clients.
Video Projects
Returning Clients
Years in Production
Instagram Followers
Instagram Posts
Notable Clients
The company specializes in turning complex work into clear, polished, emotionally engaging media that supports brand awareness, education, sales, and community connection. Notable clients include Casella, Union Mutual, Spectrum Family Services, Snowflake Chocolates, Vermont Symphony Orchestra, Healthy Living, Pet Food Warehouse, O'Brien Brothers, Efficiency Vermont, Common Roots, VEDA, and The Soda Plant.
Founded 2011. Project and client figures as published on retromotion.co. Burlington, Vermont, working across Vermont and New England.
RetroMotion grew one project at a time. What started as production work turned into years of directing interviews, writing scripts, assembling crews, managing clients, solving problems on location and cutting the results together.
The camera work mattered. The harder skill was working out what a film actually needed to say, which is rarely the thing the brief opens with.
Industrial, healthcare, agriculture, education, nonprofit. Different vocabularies, the same underlying job every time: find the human idea inside a complicated organisation.
Five stages, in the order they actually happen. The point of the structure is not bureaucracy. It is that improvisation is only affordable when everything else is decided.
A film usually succeeds or fails before the camera comes out.
Message, audience and objective get settled first. Most films that disappoint were lost here, not on set: they look correct and do nothing, because nobody agreed what they were for.
Preparation makes room for creativity rather than replacing it.
Scripting, storyboards, shot lists, casting, locations, schedule. A crew that knows exactly what the day contains has attention spare for the thing nobody planned, which is usually the good bit.
The goal is not more footage. It is the right footage.
Directing, lighting, sound, interviews, real locations, mostly non-actors. Moving fast is a consequence of the two stages above, not a talent.
Editing is usually where the real story turns up.
Edit, sound, colour, graphics, delivery. It is also where you find out what you actually shot, as opposed to what you thought you were shooting.
A tool, not a shortcut.
Used where it genuinely earns its place: concepting, visualisation, and shots that would otherwise be out of reach for a small team. Knowing when not to reach for it is the same skill.
Seven from the published portfolio, chosen because each one had a different problem to solve.
Vermont Economic Development Authority
Fifty years of development finance is an annual report, not a story. The film had to run on the farmers, manufacturers, ski resorts and clean-energy businesses the money actually reached.
Burke Mountain Academy
Alumni and faculty from one of the most demanding ski-racing schools in the country describing what it costs to grow up there. Told in their words, which meant getting out of the way.
Phoenix Feeds & Nutrition
Multi-generation dairy farmers on milk-price volatility, sustainability and family succession. Farmers can smell a marketing crew at fifty yards, so the work was earning enough trust to be boring at first.
Casella · Capstone Community Action
A tyre drive that funds winter heating. Seventeen years of volunteers, and a logistics programme that had to be turned into something a person could feel.
Vermont Ginger Soda · Black Flannel Brewing
Dickens relocated to Vermont: a Scrooge-ish brewmaster, a mechanical employee called Gingy, and a union ghost with opinions about how you treat your staff. Practical effects, a character, and an actual script.
RetroMotion Creative
Listed under A. I. Films rather than beside the documentaries, and that placement is the point. The hinge between a decade of pointing cameras at real places and the storyworld work that followed, where the images had to be made rather than found.
Independent Short Film
1914 Vermont. A sabotaged circus train, the animals loose, the ringmaster dead. Scripted narrative with no client brief to hide behind.
Most of this work is built on people who are not actors. Farmers, business owners, students, engineers, volunteers, executives, musicians.
The job is almost never to make them perform. It is to build enough trust and enough genuine curiosity that the thing they actually care about turns up on camera. Which mostly means listening before the record button, and being willing to waste the first ten minutes.
People can tell the difference between being interviewed and being processed. It shows in the footage immediately, and no amount of editing recovers it.
Sorting lines, truck bays, hospital corridors, lodges, atriums, farms, a street festival, a lounge stage. The texture is already there. The work is noticing it and not smothering it.
The most valuable part of this work was never knowing which camera to use. It was translating between two groups who do not share a language.
Clients speak in goals, products, budgets and institutional shorthand. Audiences respond to clarity, curiosity, emotion and stakes. Creative direction is the job of standing between those and making the trade honestly, without flattening either side.
That skill turned out to transfer. It is the same one a room, a menu, a character or a guest experience needs.
Running a production company meant building systems around the creative work as well as doing it.
RetroMotion runs open casting calls and a talent database covering actors, hosts, models, voice talent, extras and real people, with a published four-step submission process so applicants know where they stand. Clients get their own login for review and delivery. None of that is glamorous, and all of it buys back attention.
The better the scaffolding got, the more of the day could stay on the story. That instinct is the direct ancestor of the internal tools I later built for a bar.
I got interested in AI because it widened what a small team could attempt, not because filmmaking stopped mattering. Those are very different reasons and they produce very different work.
It earns its place in concepting, visualisation, experimentation and shots that would otherwise be impractical. Knowing when to leave it alone is the same judgement, and the harder half.
The test never changed.
Does it make the story better? Everything else is a preference about tools.
Complicated organisations usually need a simple story, which is not the same as simplified thinking.
The useful part of an interview often happens before the formal one starts.
A factory, a farm, a bar or a boardroom has said most of it before anyone opens their mouth.
You can only chase the unplanned thing if everything planned is already handled.
People retain what they understand the stakes of.
The human problem underneath it has barely shifted in ten years.
RetroMotion ended up underneath nearly everything else I built.
Venetian used filmmaking to build a world around hospitality. Rufus Hightower came out of narrative production, practical effects and emerging tools. Impressing Ghosts runs on documentary instincts: archives, interviews, and the discipline of checking things. Even the interest in AI-forward business systems is the same reflex — understand the problem, find the human idea underneath it, build the thing that communicates it.
Founder · Creative Director · Director · Producer