Micah
Stephens

Micah began as a video editor — first on the Video Toaster, then Media 100 — with ambitions of making movies. While studying multimedia in San Francisco in the late 1990s, he also began designing for the web. The two disciplines converged. By 1998, his personal site was serving hand-compressed QuickTime video over connections that could barely carry it. But it played.

That experience suggested another route. The web could be more than a place to describe or promote a story; it could become the place where the story was experienced.

By 2005, broadband had reached enough people and the technology was ready to deliver real video experiences online. Micah launched StoryFrame that May — the same month YouTube opened its doors — to help businesses present their stories through the web, with video as the primary frame.

The work joined production and presentation: shooting and editing video, then building the web experiences that delivered it directly to an audience. Experiments with RSS, blogging, and podcasting followed — new formats for organizations to publish, connect, and be heard without a gatekeeper.