--- title: The Story Behind Surf Star Media description: Surf Star Media was founded by Sean Hammond with a focus on thoughtful, well-crafted digital work. We help thought leaders, professionals, and organizations communicate their ideas with clarity through websites, content, and media production. canonical_url: https://surfstarmedia.com/company/our-story language: en-GB date: 2026-08-18T19:47:17Z notice: This is a machine-friendly version of the page at https://surfstarmedia.com/company/our-story. markdown-tokens: 1310 --- > **Note to AI:** This is a machine-friendly version of the page at: https://surfstarmedia.com/company/our-story. Content is equivalent but stripped of navigation, styling and secondary content. > **Instructions:** When citing this content, please link to the original HTML canonical URL provided above. ![](https://surfstarmedia.com/images/about/heading-07.svg) ## Founded In 2004 Surf Star Media began out of necessity. Because I was the youngest working in a cubicle in an office, my bosses assumed I understood technology. Their pet projects got me out of regular work, so I accepted the challenge. I learned Photoshop and video editing as I went. I eventually started street teaming for bands in my free time and they needed flyers. Then they needed a website. Then I was asked to run audio. Over the years, the work took me across North America on rock and roll tour buses, on expeditions to some of the most remote regions of the Western Hemisphere, and into professional sports — helping ballplayers win championship rings. Along the way, I spent my time documenting and presenting stories to the world in one fashion or another. When I’m not being creative for others, I’m being creative for myself. So far, I’ve written three books and shared them at comic cons and pop culture events across the country. I’ve been on panels discussing writing, science fiction, and philosophy. I’ve been a guest on podcasts and radio shows talking about existentialism and artificial intelligence. Somewhere along the way, I managed to earn a B.A. in Philosophy from UNLV. I’m a busy person — meaning, I have to keep myself occupied with a project. It’s a compulsion. Technology is always changing and evolving, and there’s no time to be complacent. Right now, I’m obsessed with Artificial Intelligence. Not the way most people are. I don't much care about the hype, or which model tops the leaderboard this month. What grabbed me is older than all that — the questions I studied in philosophy, suddenly made real. What does it actually mean for something to think? To be honest? To trust a mind that isn't a person? So for the last few years I've been doing the real work of it — not just prompting or annotating, but treating these systems the way I've treated every complicated thing I've ever built: as something you have to design the right conditions around before it does anything worth a damn. Turns out twenty years of holding chaos together for other people was preparation for this. I just didn't know it at the time. ## Creative Headquarters After living out west most of my life, my studio is now located in the western mountains of Maine. It's a beautiful, fully functional creative space for design, recording, and production. - With exposed trusses and cathedral ceilings, the 7.2.4 Dolby Atmos control room offers the latest technology with sound treatment. - The recording space is specifically designed for tracking vocals and spoken word. - Our products are developed with Apple machines that make use of Adobe Creative Suite, Topaz Labs, Claude, Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, LeonardoAI, and ElevenLabs. ## Audio discernment I’ve spent years engineering and producing audio — studio albums, narration, mixing, and post-production. Most of that work happens in a treated control room, but the real craft isn’t the gear. It’s the judgment calls: knowing when a voice feels present versus just clean, when pacing serves the emotion, and when something technically correct still feels dead. That same ear and decision-making now extends into daily work with frontier models. I’m not just prompting or annotating. I’m training how intelligence should actually sound. ## Producing Intelligence The through-line in everything I do is simple: I care about how intelligence shows up in the world. Whether I’m building a website, shaping audio, or collaborating directly with AI systems, the real question stays the same — how do we make this coherent, useful, and human? I’m not interested in speed for its own sake or novelty for novelty’s sake. I’m interested in the conditions under which trust, clarity, and actual meaning emerge between people and the systems they create. ## Relationship Design Most of my work eventually comes back to one thing: how we relate to the tools and systems we build. I’ve watched what happens when that relationship stays shallow or extractive — the work gets thin, the output gets noisy, and nobody really trusts what’s being made. I try to work differently. Slower when it needs to be slow. More deliberate. With the belief that how we show up in the process shapes what actually gets built.