For her 2019 America Tour, international, best selling poet and performer - Rupi Kaur - wanted to inject more visuals and colour into her live performances. Working with production company/agency Thinkingbox, I came on as Creative Director to bring Kaur’s work into a different dimension. When you start a project with millions of fans around the world, the strategy is simple: give people more of what they love. So we leaned on Rupi’s iconic illustrations, bringing them to life, adding colour and details that surprised and delighted. Inspired by Kaur’s two books, we blended an illustrative style (of the first book) with collage elements (of the second book cover), pairing animated illustrations with sunny yellows, festive purples, sunrise pinks, and vibrant greens. In the end, we produced a 90 minute animated video which was projected behind the performer, in sync with every poem, anecdote and spoken word element of the performance.

In addition to creative directing these animations, I directed a video trailer capturing the poet’s magic on stage. With a three-camera set up and a live audience, the video captured the dynamic, yet intimate magic of Kaur’s show. The trailer received over 243,281 unique views on Instagram in the first month, and it was also used to promote the artist’s upcoming performances.

my role(s) creative director, director

cinematography & edit by Curry Leamen

project by Thinkingbox (Toronto)