Twenty years before the tools existed
Josh Gottsegen started building the Tropland Universe in 2003, his senior year at UC Santa Barbara.
He evolved Tropland from a trilogy of children's books, to an Amazon best-selling novel, to a social media universe followed by millions.
Along the way came production work spanning NBCUniversal, Disney, Warner Bros, Sony Pictures, the NFL, Ferrari, IMG Worldwide, and the Vatican Museums, including a video series he led and directed for the Vatican Museums restoration campaign through his company, OneLight Studios.
When AI arrived in 2022, he already had the world built. The characters, the stories, and the kingdom that had lived on the page for two decades finally became visible. AI is his creative medium. The world is his own.
Today Tropland Universe is the Digital Animal Kingdom: memorable animal moments that never existed and no one has seen, built to be impossible and worth sending to somebody else. Every caption discloses the AI. The IP is protected. And one owner-operator runs it all.
