Michael Carychao / Artist-Engineer
I design and build creative tools, playful systems, and worlds people can enter.
Berkeley, California
Tools for creators.
Worlds for players.
Stories in motion.
01 / Creative tools & pipelines
01 / Independent product
Midjourney animation, music, and story worlds in an interactive web experience.
Discovery, episode navigation, playback, and music behavior—designed and built together.
Creator, designer, developer
Explore the work
02 / Open source
Co-write fiction with AI, a paragraph at a time.
An open-source, cross-platform tool that alternates your prose with generated passages.
Creator, designer, developer
Explore the work03 / Creative infrastructure
A local AI studio pipeline, built for an independent creative practice.
ComfyUI, local language models, and GPUs brought together to make the studio’s work.
Independent studio creator and local AI pipeline builder
Explore the work02 / Games & physical play
04 / Current collaboration
Shared play across phones, without an internet connection.
Minigames revised with player feedback through TestFlight.
Game design and development collaborator
With Nash Weber
Explore the work05 / Historical product
A connected sword and companion fantasy game.
Kickstarter-funded. A run of 100 swords, co-created and produced with Tony Maligno.
Co-creator; electronics, iOS, digital fabrication
With Tony Maligno
Explore the work
06 / Historical release
A science-fiction world you enter through embodied VR play.
A VR puzzle game released on Steam Early Access, co-created with Jacob Dominicus.
Co-creator; game design and development
With Jacob Dominicus · Sharon Chang
Explore the work03 / AI Animation
Hundreds of experiments.
Since 2022.
Finished pieces, production experiments, and collaborations made as successive generations of image and animation tools became available.
I created the nature-world animation for a Karen X. Cheng collaboration with over one million combined views on her Instagram and TikTok.
I’ve also collaborated with The Handpan Man and am a member of the Runway Creative Partners Program.
About the animation practice →Ten ways into the archive. Choose a genre and follow a thread.
04 / Studio collaborations
Game-design prototyping
With Will Wright’s team: a generative-AI game prototype with Netflix, early Proxi prototypes, and user feedback incorporated into successive builds.
The collaboration →VFX
VFX work with Method, Shepherd, and Tippett Studios, shaped through directors’ dailies: show an iteration, respond to direction, refine the next version.
VFX collaborations →Independent studio / Selected clients
My independent studio, supported by a local AI pipeline I built with ComfyUI, local language models, and GPUs. I can build that kind of creative infrastructure for other artists and teams, too.
Inside the studio →About / purpose
I’m an artist-engineer with a B.S. in Computer Engineering from San Francisco State University, plus college study in film and comics at Hampshire College and physics coursework at the University of Chicago. I want to help make ambitious creative work possible through useful interactions, working prototypes, and carefully refined products.
An invitation / Berkeley & the Bay Area
Bring the question you can’t stop thinking about. We’ll take it into coffee shops, out into nature, and through the office, studio, and lab. Conversation, experiments, prototypes—and a magazine of actionable ideas by the next day.
Explore the day & apply →