CWI: Let's Get Started
Idaho students freeze at the choice, so I made starting the whole point. I direct and cut the campaign, and run the set: real classrooms, real tools, real students. Four years, 30+ videos, still going strong.
director · editor · on-set lead · production CWI enrollment · Idaho State Board of Education, 2025
The hardest part of college is deciding to start.
Idaho has one of the lowest go-on rates in the country. In 2024 just 43.6% of high-school graduates enrolled the next fall, well under the state's 60% goal.
CWI is a real answer to that: hands-on training for in-demand careers, at a price that makes a living possible without the debt. The barrier was never tuition or schedules. It was the decision itself.
So the job is to make something people write off as unsexy feel worth wanting. Real cuts, framing, and motion that show what it actually looks like to get hands-on inside a program, until a two-year degree looks like somewhere you want to be.
DJ built the guide the whole campaign edits to.
The guide came out of the work, not ahead of it. Round by round DJ wrote down what was working: the type, the color, the pacing, the export specs. It grew as the campaign grew, and every editor on every round cuts to the current version, so four years of films still read as one thing across every program and every screen.
A spot for every program.
DJ directs and cuts a film for each program, one at a time, built around what that path actually gives a student. Real students play the leads. Same voice across all of them, a different world each time.
Fire Service 
Public Safety 
Arts + Humanities 
Technology 
Business Admin Every film ships in every ratio the media plan needs. Broadcast and web at 16:9, the feed at 1:1, stories and reels at 9:16. Same story, recut for where it lands.
DJ directs it, runs the set, and cuts it.
I direct and cut the Let's Get Started program spots, working alongside the agency Against, executive producer Steph Norrell and producer Tess Rizvi, with Jake Rapp, Nathan Zanders and Kova Kovatonic on camera and Vision Kit on stills. Every quarter I make four to six new films with a crew of five to twenty, and I build each one around the specific program, digging into what that path actually gives a student.
Real students play the leads. On shoot days I run the set: directing the talent, working with the DP on how it gets shot, and keeping the crew moving with Tess on production, then I take it into the edit and cut it for every screen. I frame the students as the heroes and put the real tools and payoff of the program on screen.
I have worked in Idaho education for more than ten years, and I bring that to every round. This one is homegrown, made with hometown friends and a client as fired up about it as I am. Together with them, I am putting Idaho opportunities in front of the students who benefit most, and shifting the culture a little each quarter.
A quarterly machine, four years deep.
Four to six new films every quarter, each one directed and shot from scratch, then cut down into every aspect ratio and run on TV and across social. Rounds one through six and counting.
On TV and social · every aspect ratio · :15 and :30 · four years and counting
The college keeps climbing.
The real competitor was never other colleges. It was self-doubt. So the work skips the college-ad playbook, no campus tours, no logo-first branding, just the decision to start.
And the college it serves keeps growing. CWI has now posted nine straight semesters of enrollment growth, up 6.8% last fall to more than 31,000 students, the largest community college in Idaho.
98% of CWI's students are Idahoans. Every one of those enrollments is a bet on the state, which is exactly why this work matters to me.
Enrollment: Idaho State Board of Education · Idaho Education News, 2025
"The hardest part of college isn't the classes. It's deciding to start."
The insight the campaign is built on
