Michael McGee

Seven small white boats moored in a row on dark green water, seen from above

I’m a photographer, filmmaker, designer and app developer in New York. I shoot, cut and grade my own work, and I build the tools I shoot with, down to a film camera app and a cinema camera.

Photographs

Travel, street and portraits, shot on digital, a Ricoh GR, and 35mm and 120 film. Select any frame to see it larger.

Sailboats scattered across a blue bay below a hillside, a white building in the foreground
Black-and-white photo of a tall palm tree above a rocky shoreline
Poster reading A Paradise on Stilts in heavy white type over a Ferris wheel and blue sky
Sunset over the sea through heavy clouds, with an orange light leak along the left edge
Silhouetted trees under a pink and orange dusk sky
Portrait of a woman in tinted aviator sunglasses in golden evening light
Portrait of a man in aviator sunglasses resting his chin on his hand, warm light behind him
A harbour with a Ferris wheel and mountains behind it, rocks in the foreground
A grey-blue sea under an overcast sky with a small ship on the horizon
Black-and-white seascape, waves breaking on rocks and a sailboat on the horizon
Black-and-white portrait of a woman in a white jacket with one arm raised
Film frame of beach umbrellas and striped deck chairs, with the film's edge markings visible
Film frame looking out from shade to a beach, one person standing at the water's edge
Coastline at dusk, houses stacked up the hillside above a small beach
A curving hillside street with a bougainvillea bush in flower on the corner
Red bougainvillea flowers against a clear blue sky
A man sitting on a wooden bench, head in his hand, looking at his phone
A woman in pale green trousers sitting in an office chair outside a small kiosk
A woman in a yellow football jersey sitting on a balcony above the city
A woman in a floral shirt and green trousers leaning against a stone wall
Portrait of a woman in soft window light, looking away from the camera
A woman in a fur coat in warm orange light, her head resting on her hand
A black Volkswagen Beetle parked on a sunny street
A duck swimming in bright blue water

Film

A 23-second short in 2.39:1. Shot, edited and graded by me.

Animation

Direction and storyboarding for a short spot.

Just Fly

A spec spot for a running brand. I created the character, wrote the shot list and storyboarded each frame, then animated it with AI image and video tools.

Storyboard frame: an empty field of tall grass under summer clouds Storyboard frame: the runner lying back in the grass, looking at the sky Storyboard frame: the runner crouching to tie his shoes Storyboard frame: the runner leaping into the sky under the Just Fly title

Storyboard frames in shot order. Spec concept, not affiliated with Nike.

Apps

Both designed, built and shipped by me, from the first sketch to App Store review.

MIKEY 7S

iPhone and iPad, free with a Pro upgrade

An analog film camera for iPhone. Every shot runs through one of eight film stocks I built as real-time Core Image pipelines, with grain, halation and tone curves tuned by hand instead of LUTs.

MIKEY 7S gallery screen MIKEY 7S darkroom screen MIKEY 7S camera skills screen
MIKEY 7S on the App Store

Prodogochi

iPhone and Apple Watch, $3.99

A focus timer dressed up as a virtual pet. Your companion grows only from real focus sessions and finished tasks, never from feeding or minigames. The characters are real-time 3D, built in Three.js.

Prodogochi home screen with the companion robot Prodogochi focus timer screen Prodogochi morning dream card
Prodogochi on the App Store

Print

A magazine for MIKEY 7S and a coloring book on Amazon, both published by my studio, Just Fly Studio.

MIKEY 7S magazine

Issue 01, ten pages on uncoated cream stock. Read the full issue (PDF, 3.5 MB)

MIKEY 7S magazine cover: the name in cream on emerald green, with a gold line drawing of a rangefinder
Spread: Not LUTs, a real-time analog pipeline, facing a diagram titled Anatomy of a capture
Spread: swatches for the eight film stocks, facing the four viewfinder tools
Spread: the app icon on cream, facing the studio manifesto on green
Pattern Atlas cover: a ring of colored Apollonian circles on charcoal, under the title in cream serif capitals

Pattern Atlas

Paperback coloring book, 8.5 × 11 inches, $9.99

Fifty mathematical designs to color: Penrose tilings, hyperbolic disks, Apollonian circles, Islamic star patterns and more. Every design is drawn precisely in code, and each faces a short note on the math behind it.

Coloring page: Mandala of Twelve Coloring page: Penrose rhombs Coloring page: Apollonian gasket Coloring page: hyperbolic heptagons in a disk
Pattern Atlas on Amazon

Hardware

When the camera I wanted didn’t exist, I designed one.

The MK-1 cinema camera: a champagne aluminium body with a black lens and a screen on top

MK-1 cinema camera

An open-hardware cinema camera built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Sony IMX585 Super 16 sensor, running CinePI. I modeled the body and built its interactive product page in Three.js.

Open the 3D model