II · 1AU Studio2024–
AU Studio is a photo and film studio built around the eye of Austin Augie. The pictures are his. Everything around them (the identity, the pitch, the clients, the shape of the business) is the other half of the work.
It began in January 2024 with a request for a website. Augie was living among the Amish in a small town in Indiana and wanted a studio of his own. Over a series of long conversations the website became a brand. Still called Studio Augie, it was organised around three pillars, fashion, weddings and events, and months went into his hard drives to find the selects that would carry each one.
In 2025 the studio became AU Studio. Designer Sebastian Hunger-Bühler was commissioned for the new identity, built on the zoetrope: hand-drawn illustration, logos, wordmarks and animated gifs. The site that followed pairs a splash page with an index, so the work reads both as an overview and in detail. Video appears as gifs rather than heavy files, which keeps the whole site moving.
The commissions run wide. For Flashfood, a three-part interview series with the head chefs of HAGS, Theodora and Chez Ma Tante. Weddings, including one in France. Don of the Streets, an underground, high-stakes street BMX jam, promoted through a rollout of around ten assets that helped bring an estimated thousand riders onto New York's streets.
AIR is the studio's own documentary series, made with and named for Air, the creative platform for organising and sharing visual work. Released as long-form YouTube episodes with a companion social series, it follows Augie through Peru, Thailand, Laos, Japan, Kyrgyzstan and China. It is not a commercial. The platform is never pitched; it is simply part of how the work on screen gets made, and the audience goes looking for it, wanting in on the same life. A single reel from Kyrgyzstan passed 6.9 million views, Air's Instagram grew from 10,000 followers to more than 100,000, and the series became the ground for partnerships such as Interrail. The same conviction ran through the studio from the start: let people find the work rather than push it at them.
For the studio's films, title cards and captions for Dead Weight, and title cards for Fish Out of Water.
Then the part a studio rarely shows. Pitch decks and media kits for new business. A monthly newsletter to a list of more than 1,500, its design drawn from Japanese washi paper and the studio's identity. A cloud archive that turns years of footage into something that can be searched and curated. Most of it stays internal; a few slides appear here with client names withheld.
