About
Taste first. Tools second.
9th Degree Media is a founder-led creative studio. People develop the concept, direct it, edit it and finish it; AI is one of the production tools in between. We make performance creative for e-commerce brands, and commercials and films through Studio.
Founder
Tristan Lee Muller
Founder & Creative Director
Ten years selling things before I started making ads for them.
I'm Tristan Lee Muller, founder and creative director of 9th Degree Media. I spent more than ten years on the business side of attention: co-running a lead-generation agency in Johannesburg, leading marketing at a digital agency across South Africa, the US and the UK, and running sales for a consulting firm. Then the Miami art world, curating exhibitions and running live auctions. AI started as a hobby and became the work: a marketer's instinct for what sells, with a curator's eye.
How we work
Directed, not prompted
Every piece starts with an idea and a shot plan, the way a live shoot would. The tools are how we build it, not how we think it up.
Honest about AI
We use AI as one tool alongside After Effects, grading, sound and hands-on editing, and we label our work as AI-assisted. Spec work is labelled as spec. AI-generated people are never presented as real, we never use a real person's likeness without written consent, and we never imitate public figures.
Built to perform
Beautiful isn't the brief; working is. Our background is marketing and sales, so every piece is made for the first two seconds of a feed and the job it has to do after that.
Remote by design
A virtual team working with brands in United States, United Kingdom, South Africa and United Arab Emirates.
What we use
- After Effects
- Motion design, kinetic type, product reveals and compositing
- AI image & video tools
- Environments, textures and shots that would otherwise need a set, picked shot by shot
- A human edit
- Pacing, sound, type and grade. The part no tool does for you
See the tools in action in the Lab, or read how we put them together in the Solenne case study.
Let's talk.
Product ads: start with The 24-Hour Ad Test. A commercial, brand film or music video: tell us about the project.