Our story / Geri & Shorne
Geri Fortune spent ten years writing her autobiography, Blooming From Ashes. Working as a bartender and raising identical, mirror-image twins, she often wrote after the bar closed, continuing until it was time to send her boys off to school.
Her story took shape in those hours: a working mother finding time to put her life into words. That decade of writing would become a creative foundation for FORGE Studios.
Geri brought the story and the vision. Her husband, Shorne “Q” Fortune, brought a lifetime of building—businesses, creative projects, and the systems that help ambitious ideas become real. His experience spanned the creative, administrative, and financial sides of music, along with film editing, behind-the-scenes filmmaking, and audio production.
He also loved the craft of vintage radio drama: the voices, the atmosphere, the carefully made Foley sounds that could place a listener inside a scene. An entire world, assembled for the ear.
That fascination became deeply personal when serious illness threatened Geri’s eyesight. More than 25 surgeries in under 19 months became part of the effort to preserve it. As her vision changed, Shorne found himself returning to a simple thought: if seeing a movie had become difficult, why couldn’t he make one she could hear?
Movies for your ears.
The thought became a shared purpose. Together, they began building a studio where Geri’s imagination and voice could help shape stories experienced through sound.
Today, Geri and Shorne are the co-founders and founding voices of FORGE Studios, an independent entertainment studio developing six original narrative properties alongside an emerging music roster. Geri guides story architecture, continuity, and audio quality. Shorne builds and refines the infrastructure and production processes that carry the work toward release.
Their partnership brings an author’s attention to human experience together with a builder’s determination to make it work—and a shared affection for stories that hold people close.
Before FORGE had a name, Geri was writing between the end of one working day and the beginning of her children’s next. Now, together, they are building a place for those stories to be heard.
Meet the founders
Co-Founder & Founding Voice
Geri Fortune is the author of Blooming From Ashes, an autobiography she spent ten years writing while working as a bartender and raising identical, mirror-image twins. Often writing between closing time and the school morning, she built the creative foundation that would help shape FORGE. A former senior leader in the service industry, she now guides story architecture, continuity, and audio quality across the studio’s six original properties.
Co-Founder & Founding Voice
Shorne “Q” Fortune builds the systems that give imagination somewhere to go. An entrepreneur who has founded and led multiple businesses, he brings experience across the creative, administrative, and financial sides of music, alongside film editing, behind-the-scenes filmmaking, and audio production. At FORGE, he builds and refines the infrastructure and repeatable processes behind the work, using AI-assisted production to reduce administrative tasks and make more room for creative iteration.
Building FORGE meant finding a way to give two founders’ ambitions room to grow. Shorne brought the same care to the studio’s working methods that Geri brought to its stories—building repeatable processes, refining production steps, and using AI to reduce the repetitive work surrounding creative production.
That approach gives the founders more time to develop, test, listen, and refine. AI supports the work; Geri and Shorne remain responsible for creative direction, story continuity, and the quality of what reaches the audience.
FORGE brings a love of traditional audio craft together with contemporary production tools, pursuing a deeply personal ambition: to make movies for your ears, with the discipline to keep making them.