The Innovator
Mike Friton spent over 30 years designing for Nike before turning his hands to a stranger mix of crafts: shoemaking, weaving, and paper sculpture. Director Tristan Stoch follows Friton in his workshop as he moves between these trades, treating each material, leather, thread, paper, as another version of the same problem he solved for decades at Nike, building something functional and precise by hand. The film watches him work rather than narrate over him, letting close shots of stitching, weaving, and folding carry the sense of a career built on craft rather than corporate design alone. It's a small, focused portrait of a specialist who never stopped being one after leaving the company that made him. The result plays as a study of what happens when an industrial designer's instincts get applied to slower, older crafts, and of a maker who seems most at ease with something taking shape in his hands.