Digital Content - fashion film and social content, directed and edited by Caeden Smilde
03 entries
The clothes move. Somebody has to decide how they are seen moving.
purSUIT
MODA Spring 2026 · 2026I designed the line, then decided how you would be allowed to see it.
The film for my MODA Spring 2026 line, and the first time I have designed the clothes and directed the piece that carries them.
The work here is narrative structure and sequencing: what order the looks arrive in, what you are shown of each one before it leaves, and how a line that takes eight minutes to walk becomes something with a shape when the camera decides what you see.
A runway shows you everything at once. A film gets to choose.
Structure over documentation
The default for a show film is coverage - record everything, cut it to music, hope the clothes carry it. I wanted the opposite: an order and a pace that means something, where a look is introduced, withheld, and returned to.
Sequencing
Sequencing is the decision the audience never notices and always feels. The garments existed in a fixed runway order. The film did not have to keep it.
Cigarettes & Silhouettes
MODA Spring 2025 · 2025Shot wide open, cut slow, and graded as a decision rather than a correction.
A fashion film for MODA Spring 2025, and the project where directing stopped being a word I used loosely.
Four decisions carry it: what the shot is of, how shallow the depth of field runs, how long each cut is allowed to breathe, and where the grade lands. Shallow focus is a way of pointing. Pacing is a way of insisting. Grading is the thing everyone feels and nobody names.
Everything I know about this I taught myself in DaVinci Resolve at two in the morning.
Depth of field as direction
Shooting wide open removes the choice from the viewer, which is the point. What is sharp is what the film is about in that second.
Pacing and grade
Cutting slower than felt comfortable was the hardest habit to build, and the one that most changed the result. The grade came last, and was applied as a decision about mood rather than as a correction.
Instagram Series
Instagram · 2024-2026Vertical, fast, and rebuilt every time the numbers said so.
An ongoing series documenting growth - the work in progress, not the finished photograph of it.
These are cut fast and built for a vertical frame, which is a different craft from a film: the first half-second decides whether the rest exists. The edits are informed by analytics, so the format is not a preference, it is a result - what held attention got kept, what did not got rebuilt.
The clothes are the same. The grammar is completely different.
Vertical is not a crop
A 9:16 frame has one subject and no room for a second idea. Composing for it means deciding earlier and committing harder than a 16:9 frame ever asks you to.
Analytics as an edit note
Watching where retention drops is the least romantic and most useful feedback I get. It does not tell me what to make; it tells me exactly where I lost somebody, which is a more specific note than most people will give you.
Swipe - each piece plays in frame
