January 28, 2026
UPDATE
Behind Kyle Hanagami’s :br(l):viral dance creations edited :br(l):with Final Cut Pro
New smart features are rolling out today with Apple Creator Studio
Director and choreographer Kyle Hanagami doesn’t usually watch his old dance videos. But there is one exception: a dimly lit stage performance that features eight pairs of dancers controlling glowing orbs of light as they glide through Hanagami’s emotional choreography. “It’s a piece of my heart that I left on the internet,” he says of his 2017 YouTube video featuring Adele’s “Love in the Dark.”
Hanagami rarely appears on screen in this video and he likes it that way. Despite his larger-than-life social media presence — over 7 million followers on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram — Hanagami prefers to stay behind the scenes. “I have a little stage fright,” she says.
But his presence is deeply felt through the movements of his associates. Today, Hanagami’s choreography includes eight years working with global K-pop sensation BLACKPINK and the film 2024 Mean Girls. His first major gig was serving as supervising choreographer for Jennifer Lopez’s Las Vegas residency in 2016, and he is currently choreographing Disney’s stage adaptation. Zootopia.
Self-taught on iMovie, Hanagami switched to Final Cut Pro in 2009 and found that professional tools could give him full creative control over how his work is experienced.
“I’ve always been an early adopter of technology,” says Hanagami. “Final Cut Pro allowed me to think about more than what I saw in the camera. He credits the app with helping pave the way for his career as a choreographer, equipping him with the production skills and social media savvy to translate his craft into a beloved brand.
It wasn’t always like that. Hanagami enrolled at UC Berkeley as a pre-med student. One organic chemistry class later, he changed majors—and was looking for something more when he stumbled upon his first dance group. “We would rehearse outside with a boom box and use the windows as mirrors,” he says. “I just fell in love with dance. It really took me somewhere. It wasn’t intentional.”
Hanagami’s rise online wasn’t intentional either. A dancer who enrolled in his early dance classes in San Francisco posted the first videos of Hanagami dancing on the Internet. Once Hanagami saw the demand for his choreography, he began performing in a dance studio and recording his own lessons.
“I didn’t have a camera. I just used my digital camera,” says Hanagami. “Now people with an iPhone have so much more at their disposal. They have a cinema-quality camera in the palm of their hand.”
When he first started using Final Cut Pro on his MacBook, he quickly saw how the software would quickly elevate his work. Over the years, major updates to Final Cut Pro have helped alleviate the “grunt work” that usually comes with editing, giving Hanagami back much-needed creative time. Quick AI features like Magnetic Mask allow Hanagami to make quick edits instead of frame-by-frame rotoscoping, and Smart Conform saves time when he’s shooting in landscape but needs to do a social media edit.
New features arriving today in Final Cut Pro and Apple Creator Studio—a revolutionary collection of creative applications designed to put studio-level performance in everyone’s hands—will only further enhance the ability of creatives like Hanagami to realize their artistic vision. Logic Pro makes music production easier than ever. Now artists can fill their workflows with intelligent tools like Stem Splitter and Mastering Assistant, allowing them to focus on their creative process. Pixelmator Pro makes it easy to edit images and create striking graphics on Mac and iPad, allowing anyone to customize vector designs or typography effortlessly.
“I choreograph to the music so deliberately, so being able to cut with that same intention is so important,” he says. Using Logic Pro’s artificial intelligence model, Beat Detection—available today in Final Cut Pro—allows Hanagami to instantly analyze any music track and display a Beat Grid, so he can create quick videos that quickly and visually match his cuts to the music. “When I need to loop a track for my class videos, I’m able to line it up much faster with beat detection instead of manually looking at the waveforms and scrolling them.”
For Hanagami, these tools had a direct influence on his creative output. Before Mean Girls He shot the first sequence on his iPhone to make sure the eye lines and angles worked without being weighed down by heavy photography equipment. Once the choreography was in place, Hanagami could easily move forward with a clear visual of the end result and show the studio an example of the set.
“Editing goes hand in hand with what I do,” says Hanagami. “If you’re always thinking from a static perspective, you’re going to be limited in your range of possibilities. Understanding the possibilities of what a camera and software can do allows you to think bigger.”
In the studio, Hanagami experiments with Live Multicam using Final Cut Camera and Final Cut Pro for iPad to capture different angles at once, as seen in his members-only dance tutorials on YouTube. “It’s super easy,” he says. “You can literally plug everything in and have it sync so you don’t have to sync afterwards. And then you can just click through and edit with a tap.”
For Hanagami, Apple’s ecosystem isn’t just a collection of tools—it’s tightly integrated into every step of his workflow. From sketching on iPad, shooting on iPhone, editing in Final Cut Pro on Mac and iPad, and sharing across platforms, each device is an integral part of every step of his process.
“Having my iPhone with me all the time was the biggest game changer,” he continues. “As soon as inspiration strikes, I’m ready to shoot, and it’s kept me on my toes. When you have such a crazy life, it’s really important to find things you can rely on. And I find that in both the products I use and the people I work with.”
Press Contacts
Tara Courtney
Apple
tcourtney@apple.com
Lance Lin
Apple
lance_lin@apple.com
Apple Media Helpline
media.help@apple.com