U2

There are moments in your career that only make sense when you look back. This was one of them.

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The day I closed my production company in London, we sent out a short email letting everyone know Rumble was coming to an end. Within a few hours, more than a hundred replies landed in my inbox. Most were messages of support. One of them was a project for U2.

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I’d spent years running a studio rather than directing, so I felt surprisingly rusty. Suddenly I was back doing what I loved most—building a team, developing ideas, and making animation again.

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The first person I thought of was Hamid Bahrami.​ Hamid had been one of my tutors at House of Cartoon in Iran. To us, he was a legend. His drawings were unlike anything I’d ever seen—beautiful, strange, unpredictable. At the end of every class he’d wander around the room, sketching directly into our notebooks. Everyone left with a little piece of Hamid’s imagination. Years later, asking him to collaborate on a U2 project felt surreal.​ 

 

Even more surreal was working alongside another former teacher, Campbell, who had taught me at university. Looking back, I realise how much of this project was shaped by the people who had shaped me.

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Hamid’s artwork became one of the defining elements of the film, and U2 loved the final piece.​ During the show, Brian Burke saw the work, noticed my name in the credits, and got in touch about another project.

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That single phone call became the beginning of my career designing visuals for live shows.

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Sometimes the end of one chapter really is the beginning of the next.