About
STORIED STUDIOS CREATES BESPOKE DOCUMENTARY, SCRIPTED, AND ANIMATED FILM CAMPAIGNS FOR NOT-FOR-PROFITS, BRANDS, AND TELEVISION AND STREAMING PLATFORMS. CONTACT US TO LEARN MORE.
After two decades in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles producing and directing documentary films for international public and cable television outlets, filmmaker Joanna Rudnick joined a life-sciences and healthcare agency in the Bay Area where she built and led a full-service creative team. The experience brought Joanna back to her training as a science, environmental, and health journalist and further opened up the worlds of 2D and 3D animated video, live-action animation hybrids, and 360 experiences.
The creative magic of all of these worlds coming together leads to Storied Studios, where Joanna combines her passion for documentary film and advocacy with her training and interest in humanizing healthcare stories and working with companies and not-for-profits to foment meaningful action.
Services
We handle all aspects of casting, pre-production, production, and post-production and work in close collaboration with our partners. In order to maximize our reach, we create video toolkits that include a number of versions of the main film targeted and edited for different channels and targeted audiences.
Documentaries
CONSULTING
PRODUCTION
DIRECTION
Story Development
Proposal Development
Budgeting
Fundraising
Distribution
Directing
Story Producing
Line Producing
Branded Video
BRAND LAUNCH
BRAND AWARENESS
PRODUCT LAUNCH
Documentary Film
Animated Film
Scripted Film
Social Media Trailers
Town-Hall/Annual Meeting Video
Digital Video Ads
YouTube Pre-roll
Tradeshow Loop
360 Video
Not-for-profit
ADVOCACY
FUNDRAISING
ACTIONS
Documentary Film
Animated Film
PSA
Event Video
Outbound CTA Videos
Social Media Trailers
We have documentaries in development. Check the News section for updates.
Documentaries
In the Family
In the Family is a documentary about predicting breast and ovarian cancer, the consequences of knowing, and the women who live with the risk. Beginning with her story of testing positive for the familial breast cancer mutation (BRCA), filmmaker Joanna Rudnick chronicles the lives of several women currently undergoing the process of genetic testing—following them from their decision to seek testing, through the testing process, and in the aftermath when they are coming to terms with the information they receive. These stories of the first generation of women to live with the knowledge that they are predisposed to a life-threatening disease teach us what it means to survive a diagnosis of high risk without being consumed or defined by it.
Role: | Director. Producer. Writer |
Production Company: | Kartemquin Films |
Broadcast: | 2008 POV | PBS |
On Beauty
On Beauty follows fashion photographer Rick Guidotti, who left the fashion world after he grew frustrated by the restrictive parameters of the industry’s standard of beauty. It was a chance encounter with a young woman at a bus stop with the genetic condition albinism that reframed Rick’s lens forever on people who are closed out of the beauty industry and too often relegated to the shadows. By doing so, he not only changes their self-perceptions, he challenges our perceptions of beauty.
Role: | Director. Producer. Writer |
Production Company: | Kartemquin Films |
Broadcast: | 2017 Shorts TV 2018 Reel Midwest |PBS |
Crossfire Hurricane
Legendary British rock band The Rolling Stones mark their 50th year together in this all-access archival masterpiece that gets at the essence of memory and the role of the band in society.
Role: | Supervising Producer |
Production Company: | Milkwood Films and Tremolo Productions |
Broadcast: | 2012 HBO 2012 BBC |
Bill T. Jones: A Good Man
A Good Man follows acclaimed and provocative director/choreographer Bill T. Jones as he and his company create their most ambitious work, an original dance-theater piece in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s Bicentennial.
Role: | Producer |
Production Company: | Kartemquin Films |
Broadcast: | 2011 AMERICAN MASTERS | PBS |
Hard Earned
Hard Earned tells the story of five ordinary American families as they face the reality of everyday life in a post-recession economy. With the majority of job recovery being low wage, a new class of workers dream of a better life while they struggle to survive.
Role: | Director – Hilton and Diana’s Story |
Production Company: | Kartemquin Films |
Broadcast: | 2015 Al Jazeera America |
Branded Video
Mila's Story
Mila was diagnosed in January 2017 with Batten disease; a rare disease caused by genetic mutations that leads fat to accumulate in nerves and brain cells. Her type of Batten’s is particularly rare and fatal with no therapy available. Her family is on a mission to turn her incredible story into a new treatment path for children across hundreds of devastating disease.
Agency: | The Linus Group |
Partner: | Charles River Laboratories |
Role: | Director |
Evie’s Story
When Evie was born, she wasn’t expected to survive due to a rare metabolic bone disease which affected her ability to make bone, breathe, and to walk. As her parents worried for her future, a clinical trial opened up for a promising new enzyme therapy to treat her ultra-rare disease.
Agency: | The Linus Group |
Partner: | Charles River Laboratories |
Role: | Director. Producer. Creative Director |
We Believe: Alesia's story
In 2019, Storied Studios commissioned world-renowned paper artist Yulia Brodskaya to create portraits of three women diagnosed with breast cancer, who all had a genomic test to determine their course of treatment. The bespoke and unrepeatable nature of each portrait represented the uniqueness of each woman’s story, disease, tumor and treatment. This is the epitome of precision medicine and precision oncology come to life on film.
Production Company: | Storied Studios |
Partner: | Agendia |
Role: | Director. Producer. Creative Direction |
We Believe: Angie's Story
In 2019, Storied Studios commissioned world-renowned paper artist Yulia Brodskaya to create portraits of three women diagnosed with breast cancer, who all had a genomic test to determine their course of treatment. The bespoke and unrepeatable nature of each portrait represented the uniqueness of each woman’s story, disease, tumor and treatment. This is the epitome of precision medicine and precision oncology come to life on film.
Production Company: | Storied Studios |
Partner: | Agendia |
Role: | Director. Producer. Creative Direction |
Trial of One
Agency: | The Linus Group |
Role: | Director. Producer. Creative Director |
Ginger’s Story
Like most lung cancer patients, Ginger Tam’s symptoms began with a nagging cough that doctors initially tried to quell with antibiotics. Tam, a musical performer, who thought she was in good physical shape, was shocked to learn that her problem wasn’t an infection but Stage IV non-small cell lung cancer. Years of treatment took her voice away and with it, her livelihood. With a new clinical trial, she not only got to watch her daughter go to high school, she got her voice back.
Agency: | The Linus Group |
Partner: | Charles River Laboratories |
Role: | Director. Producer. Creative Director |
The Unrelenting Pursuit
In 48 hours, two pediatricians, two engineers, and an industrial designer prototype an inventive and plausible solution to newborn breathing-related problems, which claim the lives of an estimated 1.8 million newborns every year.
Agency: | The Linus Group |
Partner: | Elsevier |
Role: | Director. Producer. Creative Director |
Answering Biological Questions with Spacial Genomics
Resolve Biosciences has created a Molecular Cartography platform that helps scientists gain new insights into today’s most challenging biological questions through high-resolution imaging of single-cells to reveal spacial dynamics and sub-cellular communications. CEO Jason T. Gammack provides a beautiful 3 dimensional tour of the data and the search for new ground truths in biology.
Production Company: | Storied Studios |
Partner: | Resolve Biosciences |
Role: | Creative Direction; Video direction and production; 3D animation |
The Disruptors
Mark Kotter from bit.bio is taking a software-inspired approach to synthetic biology by reprograming stem cells to become every cell type in the body.
Production Company: | Storied Studios |
Partner: | Charles River Laboratories |
Role: | Mark Kotter from bit.bio is taking a software-inspired approach to synthetic biology by reprograming stem cells to become every cell type in the body. |
Not-for-profit
RARE AS ONE
#RareAsOne: 7,000 Rare Diseases, 1 Fight
Dr. David Fajgenbaum, Dr. Maria Kefalas and her daughter Cal, Nasha Fitter and her daughter Amara, Onno Faber, Emily Kramer-Golinkoff, and Tracy Dixon-Salazar and her daughter Savannah all have one thing in common: rare disease. Their journeys may be different, but their fight to find a cure connects them.Meet these fearless rare disease patients and their families and learn more about their efforts to drive forward progress against rare disease.
Production Company: | Storied Studios |
Role: | Director |
Partner: | Chan Zuckerberg Initiative |
Free The Data
What happens when a scientist, a street artist, and breast cancer survivors and “previvors” come together to create a community mural? A compelling story of the injustice of one company owning our genetic information and keeping it locked up in a black box where it cannot be analyzed and shared. The people in this video—all with mutations in the BRCA genes—are calling upon all of us to join this grassroots movement to FREE THE DATA.
Production Company: | Storied Studios |
Role: | Director.Creative Director |
Partner: | Free the Data Coalition and Invitae |
Emily's Entourage: No One Left Behind
Emily’s Entourage is a patient-led organization led by a young woman with Cystic Fibrosis fighting to save her life while changing the way and the pace at which drug development in rare disease is done.
Production Company: | Storied Studios |
Role: | Production, Direction and Writing |
Organization: | Emily's Entourage |
The Magic Line
2 women. 1 fatal disease. Their stories were the same, until one day, they weren’t. A breakthrough drug gets approved for 90% of the Cystic Fibrosis community, and straight from a Hollywood film, one woman is part of the 90% that get a second lease on life, while the other falls in the 10% that do not. The Magic Line is a fine, seemingly random line that dictates everything—even life and death. But the thing about lines is that they aren’t permanent.
Production Company: | Storied Studios |
Partner: | Emily's Entourage |
Role: | Creative Direction, Director and Producer |