Vedant
Kohli
A universe of narratives — excavated, engineered, and measured.
A universe of narratives — excavated, engineered, and measured.
As a child, that question often tested my teachers' patience. It took me years to realize that what felt like restlessness was actually a method — a way of questioning an idea until the assumptions beneath it began to unravel.
That realization came during a United Nations Study Tour, in a conversation with Dr. Andrea Bartoli about the Sant'Egidio community and the 1992 Rome General Peace Accords that ended Mozambique's civil war. We moved beyond what had happened to explore why: religious motivation, legitimacy, belief, and the ethics of intervention. When the room applauded, something clicked. The questioning I had once seen as disruptive could, in the right room, become a public act.
Later, as I began listening to podcasts, I found myself searching for that same depth but rarely finding it. Even brilliant conversations would jump between ideas, losing the thread that connected a conclusion to the reasoning behind it. So I decided to create the kind of conversation I had always wanted to hear. That is how Phoerus, my video podcast, was born.
Every summit is only a better vantage on the next question.
Mt. Renok · 16,500 ft · Basic Mountaineering Course, HMI Darjeeling
Phoenix and Taurus. The bull is the human being inside a digital arena — shaped by algorithms, narratives, conditioning, spectacle. The phoenix is the moment you become conscious of the arena you are standing in.
Phoerus is intellectual excavation through conversation: structured inquiry aimed at maximum explanatory depth with minimum intellectual waste. Not only what a person believes — but how that belief holds together.
Guests across film, technology, academia, and spirituality.
The world's first podcast-movie — a long-form conversation, refracted through narrative film.
After eight episodes, I hit the limit of the form. The depth was there; the pull wasn't. So I gave my capstone a problem: how can a long-form podcast keep its intellectual depth and become genuinely gripping — amplifying what the conversation does to the people watching?
My answer is a hybrid. A long-form interview runs alongside a metaphorical narrative film, working across three interlocking layers. The film doesn't illustrate the interview; it develops its own story and argues with the ideas, while the edit balances intellectual substance against emotional urgency. It's informed by cognitive psychology and built with professional AI filmmaking tools.
Right now I'm evaluating the format with an experimental audience-response survey — measuring whether the hybrid actually moves viewers more than the conversation alone.
Next, I want to extend the storyworld beyond the screen into a transmedia narrative — letting its characters and ideas keep evolving across platforms and social media into ongoing conversations, communities, and, eventually, collective action.
Student reflections after an immersive journey through Holocaust sites across Poland and Germany, including Auschwitz — led end to end, from concept and filming to final edit.
Jun navigates the daily challenges of college life far from family, holding a steady, reliable face before them.
The student organization I founded and led to produce and showcase original films across campus and beyond. I ran publicity and press for festival-recognized filmmakers — including Farah Nabulsi's The Present and the documentary Stranger at the Gate — and opened production opportunities for student filmmakers, among them a campus collaboration with the Ashmawey brothers on The Stage.
The other half of the craft: treating an audience as something to study, not guess at. Regression models, peer benchmarking, original data — strategy argued from evidence rather than instinct.
A regression study of Soka University's Instagram. I scraped 1,255 posts, engineered the variables, hand-classified every post into 15 content categories, and estimated the effect of caption length on engagement — controlling for content type, hashtag count, and posting day, with full diagnostics (VIF, Breusch–Pagan, Ramsey RESET).
Shorter captions win — significant at the 1% level, and the finding holds after correcting for heteroskedasticity. It's a hypothesis test, not a predictor: R² sits at 0.045, typical for social data, where most engagement rides on factors no model captures.
A data-driven case for a topical interview podcast for the Institute's master's programs. I benchmarked five peer-university shows, then analysed all 266 episodes of Purdue's flagship podcast to find what actually breaks out of the feed.
The pattern was decisive: topical, guest-anchored episodes on legible subjects escape the tail; clips and inside-baseball don't. From that evidence I designed the format — a remote video interview series, 20–40 minutes, each episode built on a legendary case with an expert reasoning through it live, cut into an Instagram clip ecosystem and anchored to SUA's values.
I designed a repeatable short-form video system for Soka's Bridges to Business program — evergreen by design, built to be refreshed each year, each film carrying a genuine takeaway whether or not you attend the event it supports.
My proposal originally fronted the series with a realistic AI avatar; in production we moved to a live-action format with me on camera, and I built an AI-avatar prototype separately as proof of concept. The delivered work spans three B2B campaigns.
Pre-launch previews, shared here as unlisted links ahead of their release on B2B's official channels.
Before the podcast and the films, I made social content for Soka's Marketing & Communications team — conceived, shot, and edited to run on the university's Instagram, from student features to campus life.
A photographic zine on the Acjachemen — the first people of what is now Orange County. I shot it in the Walkingstick-Romero Elders Garden at Soka, a living archive of the native plants at the heart of Acjachemen basket-weaving, medicine, and ceremony, and built it around Mother Adelia Sandoval, the Nation's spiritual overseer. Each plant is set down in the Acjachemen language beside its use — a record of a culture that endured.
Before a frame is shot, there's a script. Two very different ones — the myth that gave Phoerus its name, and a dramatic short written in Hindi.
The mythology beneath the podcast's name. A bullfight, reimagined as the attention economy: matadors bait the bull with muletas — the glowing icons of media platforms — and spears dipped in dopamine, while the crowd that profits from his engagement cheers every strike.
It's the story of Taurus, a farm bull, and Alba, the girl who loves him — and of how a dying bull becomes conscious of the arena he's trapped in and rises, like a Phoenix, as the one thing the matadors can't move. Phoenix + Taurus = Phoerus.
"Like a Phoenix he returned, my Taurus… the conqueror of himself. Lo behold, his immortal name: Phoerus!"
A dramatic short in Hindi. On a rooftop, a young writer finds his best friend, Ankur, drinking himself under after a heartbreak — abandoning the script, and the dreams, he'd built around the girl who left.
What starts as an intervention breaks open when Ankur's father arrives and, rather than watch his son fall alone, picks up the bottle himself. It's a short about heartbreak, friendship, and the terrible tenderness of choosing to fall alongside someone.
"Is nav mein tu akela nahi dubega — hum sab tere saath dubenge." "You won't sink in this boat alone — we'll all sink with you."
I finish my degree at Soka in December 2026, and I'm looking for teams — in studios, streaming, and consumer insight — who want a narrative excavated, built, and measured by the same person.
