Monolith / field archive / Cleveland + LA
The studio / Cleveland, Ohio
Monolith is an independently owned production studio led equally by Matt and Zenen. We make video work for brands, organizations, artists, and founders who care how their story feels—not just that it exists.
Why we built it
Monolith began as a way to bring the standards, pace, and taste of larger production environments back into the place we call home. Cleveland is not a limitation. It is a point of view.
The work is local, national, commercial, documentary, and sometimes stranger than a clean category allows. What matters is whether the film has a reason, whether the images carry weight, and whether the final piece feels considered.
Matt + Zenen
Both of us move between concept, direction, camera, production, and finish. The work is divided by what each project needs—not by fixed titles.
Matt brings years inside Los Angeles production environments, live sports, entertainment, and commercial work. His instinct is structural: finding the story, building the plan, and knowing what a production needs to hold together from first conversation through finish.
Zenen’s eye was shaped through music videos, photography, analog film, and artist-driven work in Ohio. He loves the discipline of 16mm: light, texture, patience, and the way real film forces every frame to be intentional.
The name comes from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the goal is not to cosplay science fiction. The monolith is a marker: unfamiliar, deliberate, and placed at the edge of a new stage of consciousness.
For us, that idea became a way to talk about bringing experience home from Los Angeles to Ohio—and about refusing the idea that ambitious creative work has to happen somewhere else first.
As AI and automation change the creative landscape, the point becomes sharper. Tools will keep changing. Taste, judgment, restraint, and lived experience still matter.
What we protect
We use new tools when they help, but the final decisions still need a person with taste and context behind them.
Not every idea needs to be louder. Often the strongest work is the cleanest, quietest, and most specific version.
We stay close to the work from concept through finish, because the handoff between phases is where a lot of films lose their shape.
