CONTEXT JAMMING

Field notes from inside the context window.

Bret Kerr // Video Production

Studio craft,
now rendered in code.

AI-enabled, state-of-the-art video editing and creation, backed by traditional shooting, lighting and executive communications. Open to full-time and fractional roles.

At Mimecast, Bret Kerr built the video operation from a makeshift Watertown studio into a modular 4K news set, then produced the demos, people stories and event sessions that came out of it. His newest films skip the camera. They are explainers scripted, animated, voiced and scored entirely in Python with Claude Opus 5.5.

▶ Watch the explainersStudio reel
2016
First studio, built out at Mimecast HQ in Watertown
4K
Modular news set at Lexington HQ, shot on a Canon C500 Mk II
Field
On-location shoots at Black Hat, Las Vegas
Code
Two explainers rendered end to end in Python with Claude Opus 5.5
01 / New · September 2026

Explainers, made with Claude Opus 5.5.

Dense papers turned into short films: one on the physics of holography, one on how Anthropic trains Claude to be harmless. Nothing was filmed and no stock was used. Every frame, word and note comes out of a script, so a rewrite re-renders the whole film.
Physics · AdS/CFT

The Universe in a Bottle

In 1997 a 29-year-old Juan Maldacena argued that a universe with gravity can be perfectly described by a thinner world with no gravity at all, living on its edge. Three minutes on why that idea took over high-energy physics.

2:57Six chaptersOriginal scoreBret Kerr × Claude Opus 5.5
Craft notes
  • Hyperbolic {7,3} tiling of the Poincaré disk computed per pixel in numpy, so tiles shrink toward the rim the way the geometry says they should.
  • Original score synthesized in numpy and SciPy, cued to the chapter timeline: detuned strings, a glass-bell motif, an arpeggio that peaks on “stitched from entanglement.”
  • Narration by Kokoro-82M with IPA overrides so Maldacena, Ryu and Takayanagi are pronounced correctly.
Sources
How they're made
  1. 01
    Script

    Narration written as data and sourced to the paper, line by line.

  2. 02
    Voice

    Kokoro-82M runs locally and returns word-level timestamps.

  3. 03
    Picture

    Every frame drawn in PIL + numpy, with each cue locked to a spoken word.

  4. 04
    Score

    Original music and sound design synthesized in Python. No stock tracks.

  5. 05
    Finish

    ffmpeg mux, loudness pass, and burned-in captions.

02 / Studio · Mimecast

Demos, people stories, and the Black Hat stage.

Work from the Lexington studio and the field: product demos cut for sales, employee stories for recruiting, and full conference sessions with partners.

Black Hat 2025 Session: Mimecast & SentinelOne, Better Together

Event session · 17:27 · Mimecast
03 / Behind the scenes

Sets, field shoots, and the machinery behind the videos.

The modular professional news set Bret Kerr designed for Mimecast HQ in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Lexington studio buildThe professional modular news set at Mimecast HQ in Lexington, MA. Bret Kerr designed it and had it built with Sacks Exhibits of Woburn. Footage was shot in 4K on a Canon C500 Mark II.
Bret Kerr shooting a Mimecast spot at Black Hat in Las Vegas with Human Error.
Black Hat field shootBret Kerr shooting a spot with “Human Error” for Mimecast during Black Hat in Las Vegas.
April 2016, Mimecast HQ, Watertown MA. Mimecast co-founder Neil Murray, Bret Kerr, and Mimecast co-founder Peter Bauer, photographed in the makeshift first video studio Bret Kerr built out.
Watertown studio prototypeApril 2016, Mimecast HQ, Watertown, MA. Mimecast co-founder Neil Murray, Bret Kerr, and co-founder Peter Bauer, in the makeshift first video studio Bret Kerr built out.