Althea
The New Medicine: Where Serious Business Meets Sacred Medicine
A character-driven film tracing one founder’s path from a final afternoon with his father to building the infrastructure that could bring psychedelic healing into the mainstream.
Story Archetype:
Vision Story
Impact Summary
• Turned a chronological founder pitch into a story that speaks to investors’ hearts
• Positioned Niko as the credible bridge between serious healthcare infrastructure and psychedelic medicine
• Became the centerpiece of Althea’s website and investor meetings during an active funding round
Story Keywords
Our first Milestone is defining five Story Keywords that encapsulate the essence of the story. These keywords help us stay aligned on what’s most inspiring about the story, the emotional tone, target audience, and the key action we aim to drive. This alignment ensures we have a clear objective for your story before we make any creative decisions.
Inspiring Keyword
Visionary - Niko is the only person credibly building the infrastructure that could make psychedelic healing mainstream and legitimate at scale.
Uniqueness Keyword
Bridge-Building - He lived in both worlds privately for over a decade before anyone knew, making him the living proof that these worlds aren't opposites.
Audience Keyword
Skeptics - Psychonauts who distrust corporate motives, and business minds who distrust the medicine.
Feeling Keyword
Hopeful - Hopeful that the gap between these two worlds is closeable, and that someone is already closing it.
Action Keyword
Join - The conversation, the movement, and the belief that narrative repair is how the world heals.
The Why
Niko has spent fifteen years as a founder and fundraiser, and as a longtime friend he’d watched IMPACT’s work up close. What drew him in was our belief that story is how people rewrite themselves, something his own experience with psychedelic medicine had already taught him. In the middle of a fundraising round, he noticed he was telling his story on investor calls the way most founders do: in chronological order, one fact after another. He came to us first to find the narrative underneath, and once we found it, the next step was obvious. It needed to become a film.
The Challenge
Investors already knew Niko’s track record. What a résumé couldn’t convey was the answer to the question every investor was quietly asking: why him, and why this? His pitch moved through his career chronologically, and the personal reason behind Althea, the one that makes him the founder to trust beyond his previous success, got lost. His audience was also divided: psychonauts wary of corporate motives, and business minds wary of the medicine. With no brand story yet, he needed a centerpiece asset he could use again and again, one that let both sides feel why he’s the one building this bridge.
The Approach
We followed our four-step story process. A single, extended StoryFinding session surfaced the raw material. From there, we developed Story Keywords to guide every creative decision. Character Development identified his desire (helping any individual access their own transformation), motivation (questions too large for a business plan to answer), and uniqueness (a serious operator who had lived in both worlds). When we shared the character brief with him, he got chills. Then came the Storyboards, and a multi-day shoot: a hotel room the morning after his own medicine journey, Boulder, and Red Rocks at sunrise.
The Journey
This film pushed us out of our usual style. A psychedelic experience doesn’t unfold in a straight line, so we didn’t want the film to either. In the opening, we shot through a prism, letting light bend and scatter around Niko as the story begins. By the end, the film starts to come apart: more space, more silence, sound and image gently distorting, the way a journey does. Holding it together is something simpler. The film opens on photographs of Niko with his father and ends on Niko with his own children. We never say it out loud, but the medicine that helped him finally see his father now shapes the father he gets to be.
The Result
The New Medicine now lives on Althea’s website, and Niko’s using it in investor meetings throughout his current funding round. Instead of walking people through his career one step at a time, he can let them feel the story first, and the “why him” answers itself. All through the process, he kept telling us he’d never have thought to do it this way. For us, the real win is that the film doesn’t make him choose between his two worlds. The operator and the psychonaut show up as the same person. That’s the bridge Althea is building, and now people can see it.
Testimonial coming soon.
Niko Skievaski, Founder
What We Loved Most
We always seek out characters who are remarkable, who carry a deep desire, uniqueness, and motivation, and who can express themselves beautifully. Niko is all of that, and as a longtime friend, it was especially meaningful to reflect his story back to him and watch him feel seen. What we loved most was his openness. He doesn’t come with a fixed idea of how a moment should look; he trusted the process completely and let himself experience it. That trust gave us room to go further, visually and structurally, than we had before. When a character leans in like that, the work becomes genuinely fun. This one was.
