The studio
Taste first. Tools second.
9th Degree Media is an AI-native creative studio. We make brand films, ads and content systems for brands that care how they look, with a person directing every frame and AI producing it.
Founder
Tristan Lee Muller
Founder & Creative Director
I'm Tristan Lee Muller, founder and creative director of 9th Degree Media.
I've 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 working across South Africa, the US and the UK, and running sales and marketing for a consulting firm. Then a detour into the art world in Miami, curating exhibitions as a gallery director and running live auctions as a principal auctioneer, followed by scouting founders for a streaming business series.
AI started as a hobby and became the work. 9th Degree is where it all meets: a marketer's instinct for what sells, a curator's eye for what's worth looking at, and the tools to make it fast.
How we work
Directed, not prompted
Every piece starts with an idea and a shot plan, the way a live shoot would. Prompts are how we render it, not how we think it up.
Honest about AI
Spec work is labelled as spec. The people in our ads are generated unless someone has given written consent, we never imitate public figures, and we label AI content where platforms require it.
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
- Image & video models
- The leading models, such as Seedance, Kling, Veo and GPT Image, picked shot by shot
- Claude
- Research, scripts, strategy and the code behind our tools and this site
- A human edit
- Pacing, sound, type and grade. The part no model 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 turn it up.
Founding Launch Test: 2 ad concepts for one product, delivered within 24 hours of receiving your product photos. $300, limited to our first 5 founding clients.