About Johnny Rutledge
Think of me as a narrative architect.
I’ve been managing creatives in video marketing and sets for years. But I'm most proud of my work with the non-profit Artstillery, a group of theater professionals, community leaders, and artists tasked with turning marginalized oral histories into immersive experiences. Taking what I had learned from my professional career I used debriefs, documentation, and check ups to codified Artstillery’s process and mission. This helped us focus creatively, communicate with partners more effectively and more easily apply for grants.
As an artist, I know the importance of guardrails on our limitless imaginations.
It can often lead to complex places of balancing story moments with the overall goal. For a screenplay this might mean removing dialogue in favor of action, for marketing it could be telling the story of the feelings of a product not the features, for a video game it may be sacrificing a cutscene for player choice. The ability to step back and challenge a team as to what an audience will get out of a story is the trick. I’ve learned that with clients or teams you have to do this with grace and openness because ultimately you have to have trust. I’ve learned it in pitch meetings, in writer’s rooms, and over time having to repair trust from my many many small mistakes with individuals on my projects of the years. s offers? Say it here.