Delta and YouTube had a partnership. What they wanted was a reason for anyone to care about it, especially younger travelers who don't think twice about an airline. Kin had the idea: a live music series filmed inside a real Delta cabin, starring Leon Thomas, a three-time Grammy-winning R&B artist, in front of a small group of SkyMiles members and Delta employees. My job was to direct it, and make a branded series feel like something you'd stumble onto and send to a friend.
Somewhere between The Last Waltz and NPR's Tiny Desk. Cinematic enough to carry a global airline brand, raw enough that you forget there's a brand in it at all. That meant letting Leon be Leon. The brand gets the venue. The artist gets the room.
We shot it in a Delta hangar at the Atlanta airport, on a 767 that had about two and a half days before it went back into international service. In that window we had to turn a Comfort+ cabin into a concert venue, film it, and hand the plane back without a scratch on it.
The stage was designed as a system that could hold a whole series: seats reconfigured into a half-moon around the performer, warm wood, brushed metal, and an LED rig built to shift with the emotional shape of each song. Every artist gets the same architecture and makes it their own.
The plan kept growing. It started as an intimate singer-songwriter setup and ended up as Leon and his entire band inside a space about five rows deep. I built the episode structure, wrote and conducted the interviews, directed the performances, and stayed with the edit. The episode follows Leon from the tarmac to the set, with documentary footage cut against a live show where there's nowhere to hide and no second take.
Leon started out on Broadway as a kid, so between setups we ended up talking theater shop, which is not a conversation I expected to have in a Delta hangar. It helped. Two people who grew up on stages tend to trust each other fast, and that trust is the whole show when you're asking someone to be real with a camera six inches from their face.
What Happened
The episode launched on Delta's YouTube channel on April 3, 2026. After YouTube's leadership saw early cuts, they put more money behind it, and Overhead Originals ended up on billboards in Times Square and on Sunset Boulevard. It was my first time on the big boards, so I flew to New York just to stand on the sidewalk and look up at it like a tourist. No regrets.
Delta's launch posts pulled tens of thousands of interactions, well above what the airline's branded content usually does. Before it even launched, people were already talking about more episodes, which is the point of building a series instead of a spot. It's rolling out across nearly 1,200 aircraft and 165,000 seatback screens. And one Delta stakeholder told the team:
"I was skeptical of this project at the beginning… but this blows me away."
[PHOTO: You in Times Square with the billboard]