Jake Oleson

Jake Oleson is a Brooklyn-based film director and electronic musician who describes his work as spanning film, electronic music and emerging technology. He started directing at 18, making documentaries, short films and commercials for brands such as Airbnb, Facebook, P&G and Gatorade, and his shorts have been featured by Vimeo, Short of the Week and RogerEbert.com.

Given Again, which he wrote, directed, edited and scored, was made entirely from neural radiance fields (NeRFs) captured with Luma AI. Starring Michelle Nova Luna as a painter whose hold on reality breaks down, it was finished in about four weeks without a script or crew, using the fractured models that appeared when he altered the source images. He has said it was his first personal project after learning in 2019 that the father who died when he was nine was not his biological father.

The film won Silver at Runway's first AI Film Festival in New York in February 2023 and was later performed at SIGGRAPH; Radiance Fields called it, to its knowledge, the first fully NeRF short. He went on to make NeRF music videos for Zayn Malik and RL Grime, the latter with more than 700 NeRFs, and led a free NeRF filmmaking seminar at Brooklyn's Greenpoint Film Festival in December 2023. Since 2023 he has combined his films and music in live audio-visual shows, including Flux, built in Unreal Engine 5 with Kevin Peter He.