Boxes and Tales
A cinematic performance portfolio for a young vocal chorus artist selected to perform at Carnegie Hall — filmed over weeks, edited like a story, made for the press.
Go to project
Overview
Sanaa Mukalel is a talented young vocal chorus artist — and she has been selected to perform at the prestigious Carnegie Hall in New York City. Ahead of that moment, we created her performance portfolio: a cinematic film that introduces Sanaa, her voice, and her journey, built to be shared with news channels and press as her story travels.
A portfolio for a young artist can’t feel like a résumé. It has to do what her voice does — hold attention. So we treated it the way we treat every film: as a story with a protagonist, not a montage with a subject.
Sanaa needed one definitive film that could work everywhere at once: a portfolio piece for auditions and programs, an introduction for audiences discovering her for the first time, and a broadcast-ready story for the news channels covering her selection to Carnegie Hall. One film, three jobs — which meant it had to be cinematic enough for the big moment and clear enough to speak for her when she isn’t in the room.
Weeks behind the camera. We filmed over two to three weeks, building a library of footage around Sanaa — performance settings, stage moments, and the in-between frames that show the person behind the voice. Shooting across multiple days and locations gave the edit range: different light, different energy, different sides of the same artist.
The voice, recorded on its own terms. The voice-over was recorded separately from the shoot, in a controlled session — so her narration is clean, intimate, and unhurried, and the edit could lay her voice over the imagery instead of chasing usable audio on location.
An edit built like a story. The final month was where the film came together: an elaborate edit weaving the footage and voice-over into one arc — who Sanaa is, what her voice can do, and where it’s about to take her. Pacing, music, and structure were tuned pass after pass until the film earned its ending.
From a young artist’s first frames to a film ready for the press, this is what a Boxes and Tales portfolio looks like: shot with patience, voiced with intention, and edited until the story sings.