AI can generate infinite images. Infinite cuts. Infinite prose.
It cannot lose a father, smell chlorine at dawn, sit in a hospital corridor, or carry forty years of accumulated creative instinct in a nervous system.
That is not software. That is lived compression.
The industrial age gave us journalist, filmmaker, editor, creative director, broadcaster — words that belonged to an era when access to tools defined value. That wall is gone. What survives is not tool ownership but meaning. Not production but discernment. Not content but consciousness shaped through experience.
I am not becoming obsolete. I am becoming something rarer. A Carbon Director. The carbon side of carbon-meets-silicon. The bit that decays, fears death, loves anyway, and knows what story is for.
The Murdoch Newsroom
Wonder World!
A Couple 'A Cowboys
The Video Board Game Era
Los Angeles
Propvid / PlatinumHD
Cancer. Reset.
AI-Era Operations
- Simon Townsend's Wonder World!
- The new Wonder World!
- Just For The Record
- The Aquanauts
- Newsreel
- Say G'Day
- Candid Camera On Australia
- DARE
- Australia — Dream About It
- Australia — User Friendly
- Australia — Unconventional
- Australia — Discover It
- New Zealand — A Real Slice of Heaven
- Thailand — Fields of Jade
- Nightmare — The Video Board Game
- ATMOSFEAR — The Harbingers
- Nightmare sequels
- ATMOSFEAR extensions
- OZ QUIZ
- KIWI QUIZ · BRIT QUIZ
- DARE · The Truth Hurts · A Bit Sketchy
- QANTAS
- IBM
- Carlsberg Beer
- Ethiopian Airlines
- Apocalypse
- Country Comfort
- Propvid
- PlatinumHD
- McGrath
- Aston Martin
- "Then I Saw Her Picture In The Paper"
- "Blue Heeler"
I traded my copyright for a continent.
Faced with a choice between holding onto Nightmare or moving to Los Angeles, I gave up my copyright in the game in exchange for an Alien of Extraordinary Ability visa and a shot at Hollywood.
The game went on to sell over four million units. I went on to make The Aquanauts for Animal Planet, then home to invent the next thing.
Thirty years later, somebody else relaunched Nightmare on Kickstarter and raised $400,000 in weeks. Same idea. Different decade.
No regrets. The copyright bought me a continent.
Creator & Host, Simon Townsend's Wonder World!
MD, CEL Entertainment / former Head of Roadshow Sales
President & CEO, Roadshow Entertainment
VP & MD, Universal Studios International Television
Head of Production, Australian Digital Health Agency
Production Manager, A Couple 'A Cowboys
Executive Producer, Wonder World!
Development Manager, Spear's Games
Regional Manager Australia, NZ Tourism Board
Marketing Manager, Nightmare / ATMOSFEAR
cagerace.com
Extreme swimming. Designed for the screen — any screen. Live competition format from the operator who built Nightmare/ATMOSFEAR. Mobile-first, AI-scale production economics. Open to format IP / licensing partners.
Visit cagerace.comipqld.land
Solves Australia's greatest problem — affordable housing. Now. Queensland land project. The hero portrait above was shot on site, November 2025.
Visit ipqld.land