I designed and built Skytron. It runs at American Movie Company.

Make the camera disappear.

The hardest thing about a documentary-grade interview isn’t the question — it’s the eyeline. The audience has to read the subject’s eyes as if they’re looking at them, not at a journalist standing six feet to the right of the lens. Errol Morris solved this in 1992 with the Interrotron — a system of two-way mirrors that let the interviewer’s face appear directly in front of the lens, so the subject’s eyes lock with the camera while still talking to a human. It won a Technical Achievement Oscar.

The Interrotron worked, but it was bulky, expensive, and built for a 35mm-film world. By 2019 the production landscape had changed: smaller crews, faster turnarounds, virtual / hybrid talent, multi-camera streaming workflows, and the new Netflix-tier expectation that an unscripted-series interview should look as good as anything Morris ever shot.

Skytron — the modern Interrotron, refined for the Netflix era.

Across the 2019–2025 transformation window at American Movie Company, I designed and built Skytron — the proprietary on-camera teleprompter-and-talent-feedback system that became AMC’s broadcast tech moat. Skytron iterates on Errol Morris’s technical-Oscar Interrotron lineage. The system ditches the two-way-mirror physical rig in favor of a precision LED-and-prompter assembly that lets the subject see the interviewer’s face appear behind the lens, integrated with the multi-cam streaming workflow that downstream producers actually need. Bill Milling and AMC own the rental business and the trademark. I built the engineering.

The platform proved out across the work that defined AMC’s 2019–2025 era — Netflix's History of Swear Words (host Nicolas Cage with comedian-commentators Sarah Silverman, Nick Offerman, Joel Kim Booster, DeRay Davis, Jim Jefferies, Patti Harrison, London Hughes, Open Mike Eagle, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Nikki Glaser, Zainab Johnson, Baron Vaughn), Aveeno × Jennifer Aniston pandemic-era ad campaign (broadcast-grade ads shipped without anyone leaving home during COVID), Run the Jewels music videos, the Fordham Compliance Law Institute annual conferences, and the HubSpot Top-of-Year Town Hall (mid-flight pivot from on-site hybrid to fully remote using proprietary tools + vMix), and the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Shrine at Ground Zero consecration livestream (2022 · Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I blessed the rebuilt shrine at the World Trade Center site · brought back from the Greek Bicentennial work for this AMC re-engagement), the St. Angela Merici Church 125th Anniversary live stream in the Bronx (Sept 2024 · Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, attended and spoke · robotic cameras integrated into the Skytron-derived workflow) — plus a long catalog of premier-tier subject interviews where the eyeline had to be invisible and the recorded audio had to be broadcast-grade. AMC’s explainer video for the system’s remote workflow lives on the company site.

Beyond Skytron itself, the AMC engagement spanned XR Mirage (AMC’s virtual-studio platform) and the studio’s Fortune 1000 / financial-services / federal-grade broadcast and webcast workflows. The Skytron lineage is the through-line.