IMANI
God, self-worth, fake friends, Doja Cat’s night-time routine, and the Bhagavad Gita — just a handful of topics covered within five minutes of meeting Imani.
We met at a mutual friend’s concert in Woolloongabba, the kind of night where conversations blur together and faces dissolve into stage lights. But she didn’t dissolve. She cut through. Before I even registered her features, I registered her presence. Some people enter a room; others arrive. Imani arrives. It’s in her voice, her cadence, her posture, the way her smile feels less like politeness and more like a deliberate choice. Something about her makes you instinctively sit straighter and lower your voice half a register, as if your body knows before your brain does: pay attention.
Intimidation isn’t a feeling I experience often. Not because I think I’m above anyone, but because I rarely feel the need to prove myself. Yet there was something about her energy that made me hyperaware of my own. Not insecure. Just alert. Like standing near an electrical current.
After that first conversation, we made plans to meet again and talk about future prospects. We chose Newstead, which I now understand is essentially Brisbane’s Beverly Hills — a suburb where everything looks like it’s been lit for a commercial. We met inside Total Fusion Plus, a gym I later discovered has international recognition thanks to its social media presence. Even the air inside felt curated. After drinking a coffee that supposedly added five years to my life, I understood why people willingly pay $8 for optimism in liquid form.
Being exposed to that world — expensive dogs with better haircuts than most men, surgically clean athleisure, people optimising their bodies like they’re high-performance machines — only sharpened my impression of Imani. She didn’t look out of place there; she looked native to it. Success, in her case, doesn’t read as ambition. It reads as inevitability. The only thing that seemed capable of slowing her down was time itself.
Time. Success. Luxury. Exclusivity. Discipline.
Having absorbed America’s competitive velocity, her personality feels calibrated to a different frequency. If charisma were currency, she’d be inflation. And naturally, the question that began looping in my head was: how do you capture that visually?
Fashion has always been one of my biggest influences in film and photography. Not the clothing itself — the construction. The geometry. The controlled arrogance of composition. Fashion imagery understands something most visual mediums forget: aspiration is an aesthetic. The lighting, the framing, the negative space, the restraint — it all conspires to say you can’t afford this, even if what you’re looking at is technically just fabric and a person. I’ve spent years studying that illusion, dissecting it, reverse-engineering it. How does an image look expensive? How does a frame communicate status before narrative?
Over time, I developed a toolkit — small compositional decisions, lighting strategies, lens choices, pacing rhythms — that manufacture that sensation. And as it turns out, that toolkit was exactly what I needed to shoot Imani.
For four months, we created relentlessly. Six music videos. Three photoshoots. Two full production days dedicated to content for her upcoming expansion of her brow business, 404 Beauty Boutique. Twice a week we’d meet in Newstead, sit down, and dissect ideas like surgeons — album titles, thematic arcs, references, symbolism, current culture, future culture, the psychology of audiences, the politics of aesthetics. Conversations with her never stayed on the surface. They tunneled.
I’ve shot a good number of music videos, but working with Imani felt distinct. There was a shared understanding that we weren’t just making content — we were constructing a visual identity. Together we landed somewhere inside what I’d call a neo-rap aesthetic: sleek but confrontational, polished but dangerous, minimal yet loaded. The kind of visual language that doesn’t just accompany music, it announces it. Given the right time, budget, and machinery behind it, I genuinely think what we tapped into could evolve into something foundational rather than trend-dependent.
We also had the advantage of working with Liam Hall, a Brisbane-based gaffer who may legitimately be the best-dressed man in the city. His wardrobe operates like a fashion oracle. If you ever want to know what people will be wearing next season, just ask him what he wore last week. The man lights sets the way stylists build silhouettes — with intention..
The music videos generated strong audience engagement, elevated her artist branding, and demonstrated how cinematic storytelling combined with fashion-driven composition can dramatically amplify a musician’s presence online. Projects like these reinforce my focus as a Brisbane music video director: creating high-end, fashion-inspired music videos that don’t just look striking but function as strategic tools for audience growth, identity building, and long-term positioning.
Moving forward, I’m particularly interested in collaborating with artists who want visuals that feel luxurious, intentional, and culturally aware — artists who understand that a music video can operate as both artwork and marketing engine. Alongside directing and shooting, I develop visual strategies tailored to each artist’s brand, audience, and release plan, ensuring every frame contributes to a cohesive rollout. Because when image, sound, and strategy align, you don’t just release a project — you launch a presence.