① Art Direction, Motion Design, Social Media, Content Creation
② Cape Town, South Africa
③ 2013 – 2018
The origin story. My entire creative journey started when I was eleven and my step-father gave me his old MacBook. This MacBook was the key to my own city – I started playing around on Photoshop and drew digital fanart of my favourite moves; Frozen and Tangled.
This ‘Fan Account Era’ started with Disney movies. Since I was a child, I was fascinated by animation. I always dreamt of going into animation and creating these princess stories. My first fan accounts, sleepingsbeauty and franglediary, was just this. If it wasn’t photo manipulations or digital art, it was amateur animations and motion graphics of me creating my own ‘Disney’ characters. Soon after my Disney phase, I went into Miraculous Ladybug, a French animation show. Here, underneath the guise of marrychat, I continued doing the exact same. However, I decided to develop my video editing skills even further. I picked up Sony Vegas Pro 13, Final Cut Pro, and a bit of After Effects. I was about 12 at this point. Soon after this phase, A.K.A. my mother found out about another secret Instagram account, I closed up shop and pivotted once again. This time, I made my way into the online fandoms of social media stars. The star in question was Loren Gray, musically and Instagram content creator.
I decided on the username @reineloren, which translates to Queen Loren (I know a bit of French). After my mom found out about another account AGAIN, I switched usernames and started over again. (@flushedlor was the OG reineloren). In 2018, I lost access to this account. Whenever I need a confidence boost, I look at the comments of the most recent post. It serves as a reminder that my creative work goes beyond just commercialisation and metrics, but can also serve as a way to cultivate an online community of people from different corners of the world.
AGE 11-13: Franglediary and Sleepingsbeauty both amount to over 15k followers on Instagram, individually.
AGE 13-14: Marrychat becomes my first account to hit 20k followers on Instagram.
AGE 15: Flushedlor (used to be reineloren) hits 25k followers on Instagram.
AGE 16: Reineloren (new account) hits 25k followers on Instagram.
END (of humble brag)