Vertical Haus / AI production / Creative technology / Web systems
2026-05-19 / 7 min read
A launch note on moving from cinematography into AI-first production systems, the Vertical Haus stack, and the new personal website connecting both sides of the work.
The through-line
My work has always lived between pressure and taste. In cinematography, that means making decisions quickly without letting the frame lose its intent. At Vertical Haus, the same instinct became systems work: AI production pipelines, websites, content engines, automations, and launch infrastructure that help creative teams move without losing craft.
This new site is the first place where those two halves sit together properly. It is a personal portfolio, but it is also a proof-of-work surface for the way I now think: film language, AI tooling, commercial delivery, and deployable digital systems are no longer separate disciplines.
Building the Vertical Haus stack
At Vertical Haus I have been building the operating layer behind an AI-first production company: public websites, AI commercial production pages, case studies, social cards, editorial content systems, deployment workflows, and the practical automation needed to keep that all moving.
The visible work includes AI commercial production, the Queensberry x DAZN five-day broadcast sprint, the Vertical Haus x ByteDance partnership material, pre-production agent positioning, chatbot and agent pages, and a growing archive of AI film, advertising, and creative technology writing.
The less visible work matters just as much: GitHub and Firebase deployment loops, Codex-assisted production workflows, Telegram-to-Codex routing, reusable content generation patterns, and the discipline of turning experiments into maintainable systems.
Why Co-founder is a practical role
Co-founder at Vertical Haus is not a ceremonial title. It means making choices about which tools belong in a live production stack, where automation improves the work, where it damages taste, and how a company can adopt AI without turning every brief into a novelty demo.
The useful version of AI is rarely a single model. It is the route: research, references, treatment, prompt strategy, model selection, generation, edit, QA, publishing, measurement, and handoff. My job is to make that route clearer, faster, and more commercially useful.
What this website is designed to prove
The new mikestaniforth.com is built to show the overlap. It carries the cinematography credits and public references, but it also behaves like an interactive creative technology piece: motion, systems language, AI stack proof, and a more considered personal brand experience.
It is also a live example of the workflow itself. The site was planned, designed, built, tested, committed, pushed to GitHub, deployed to Firebase staging, and prepared for Cloudflare-backed domain cutover as a complete production loop.
The dark version keeps the site closer to the cinematic source language.
Why the light version matters too
A useful personal site has to survive different viewing contexts. Dark mode carries the cinema, but light mode makes the work feel editorial, readable, and easier to scan when someone arrives during the working day.
The newer version treats light mode as its own direction rather than an inverted palette: warm paper, controlled shadows, full-colour portraits, and text rules that protect contrast over image-backed sections.
Light mode now shows the same system with a more editorial surface.
What comes next
The next version will go deeper into case studies: what was built, what problem it solved, what stack was used, and what changed commercially or creatively. I want the site to become a living record of the work rather than a static showreel.
For now, the launch establishes the direction: cinematography, AI production, creative systems, and premium web experiences all under one personal brand.