January 28, 2026
UPDATE
Behind Kyle Hanagami’s :br(l):viral dance creations edited :br(l):with Final Cut Pro
Director and choreographer Kyle Hanagami doesn’t normally watch his old dance videos. But there’s one exception: a dimly lit stage performance featuring eight pairs of dancers controlling glowing orbs as they glide through Hanagami’s emotional choreography. “It’s a piece of my heart that I left on the internet,” he says, describing his 2017 YouTube video set to Adele’s “Love in the Dark.”
Hanagami rarely appears on screen in this video, and that’s the way he likes it. Despite his enormous social media presence – more than 7 million followers on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram – Hanagami prefers to stay behind the scenes. “I have a bit of stage fright,” he says.
But his presence is deeply felt through the movement of his employees. Today, Hanagami’s choreography credits include eight years of work with global K-pop sensation BLACKPINK and the 2024 film Mean girls. His first major gig was supervising choreographer for Jennifer Lopez’s Las Vegas residency in 2016, and he is currently choreographing Disney’s stage adaptation of Zootopia.
A self-taught iMovie artist, Hanagami switched to Final Cut Pro in 2009 and discovered that professional tools could give him complete creative control over how his work was perceived.
“I have always been an early adopter of technology,” says Hanagami. “Final Cut Pro allowed me to think about more than just what I saw in the camera.” He says the app paved the way for his career as a choreographer, providing him with the production skills and social media skills to translate his craft into a beloved brand.
It hasn’t always been this way. Hanagami enrolled at UC Berkeley as a pre-med student. One organic chemistry class later, he changed his major – and was looking for something more when he came across his first dance crew. “We rehearsed outside with a boombox and used the windows as mirrors,” he says. “I just fell in love with dance. It really took me somewhere. It wasn’t intentional.”
Hanagami’s online rise wasn’t intentional either. A dancer who enrolled in his early dance classes in San Francisco posted the first videos of Hanagami dancing online. When Hanagami saw the demand for his choreography, he started performing in the dance studio and recording his own lessons.
“I didn’t have a camera crew. I just used my digital point-and-shoot camera,” says Hanagami. “Now with the iPhone, people 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 take his work to the next level. Over the years, major updates to Final Cut Pro have alleviated the “grunt work” typically associated with editing, giving Hanagami back much-needed time to create. Fast AI features like Magnetic Mask allow Hanagami to make quick adjustments instead of frame-by-frame rotoscoping, and Smart Conform shaves off time when filming in landscape but needs to make a social media cut.
New features rolling out today in Final Cut Pro and with Apple Creator Studio – the groundbreaking collection of creative apps designed to give everyone studio-quality power – will only further expand the ability of creatives like Hanagami to realize their artistic vision. Logic Pro makes music production easier than ever. Now artists can supercharge 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 eye-catching graphics on Mac and iPad, so anyone can effortlessly customize vector designs or typography.
“I consciously choreograph to music, so it’s so important to be able to edit with that same intention,” he says. Using an AI model from Logic Pro, 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 clips to the music. “If I need to loop a song for my teaching videos, I can align it so much faster with Beat Detection, instead of manually looking at the waveforms and transferring it slowly.”
For Hanagami, these tools have had a direct effect on his creative output. Come on Mean girls During production, he shot the first scene on his iPhone to ensure the eye lines and angles worked properly without being weighed down by heavy camera equipment. Once the choreography was in place, Hanagami was able to easily move forward with a clear view of the end result and show the studio a preview of the set.
“Editing goes hand in hand with what I do,” says Hanagami. “If you always think from a static perspective, you will be limited in the range of possibilities. Understanding the possibilities of what a camera and software can do will help you think bigger.”
In the studio, Hanagami experiments with Live Multicam using Final Cut Camera and Final Cut Pro for iPad to capture different angles simultaneously, as seen in his member dance tutorials on YouTube. “It’s super easy,” he says. “You can literally plug everything in and have it synced for you so you don’t have to sync it afterwards. And then you can just click through and edit it by tapping on it.”
For Hanagami, Apple’s ecosystem isn’t just a collection of tools; it is tightly integrated into every step of its workflow. From sketching on iPad, filming on iPhone, editing in Final Cut Pro on Mac and iPad, and sharing across platforms, each device is essential to every step of its process.
“Having my iPhone with me at all times has been the biggest game changer,” he continues. “As soon as inspiration strikes, I’m ready to shoot and that helps me always stay on my toes. When you have such a crazy life, it’s really important to find things you can rely on. And I notice that in both the products I use and the people I work with.”
Press Contacts
David Tremblay
Apple
(647) 943-4673
Cortney Hughes
Apple
(647) 943-4562
