For RISING DAWN, the director came to me and expressed that her deepest concern was wanting to explore black joy in a way that felt authentic. We had conversations about how black youth are repeatedly shown as having traumatic childhoods in the media, and how RISING DAWN needed to feel entirely separate from that. We looked to the embodied work of Tyler Mitchell, Tik Tok dances, and skateboard photos of the 70s to help create our look.