Vol. 11

Fondue and bovril, a match made in heaven. In this volume of Cut Culture, we’re bringing you an Alpine adventure to get the blood pumping and a celebration of the FA Cup that’ll give you all the feels of football (if we do say so ourselves…). Speaking of Alpine, we’ll also take a peak behind the scenes of our latest shoot for BTW Alpine F1’s new partnership with Kappa. Completing the line-up, we’ll intro you to a set designer, art director and creative stylist - yep, those are all one person.

Cut Culture

All Downhill From Here.

A beautiful reminder that what some people will call “pretty tight”, others will call “are you out of your mind? Nobody in their right mind would ski down that! I don’t care if it’s 11am, can we just start après now?". We are not the same. Candide Thovex is a prime example of that statement, as he has made a career and life out of skiing places where the vast majority of people would dare not tread even if they didn’t have a couple slippery sticks strapped to their feet. You see quite a few skiing videos nowadays, but it was Candide who was largely responsible for laying the blueprint for these with his 2015 POV masterclass in how to go viral, ‘One of Those Days’. The nonchalance on this bloke is something else. This latest effort takes a more cinematic approach, but is equally as effective in convincing the viewer that Mr. Thovex is simply built different. Granted, this video may make you feel slightly sick even while watching from the comfort of a supine position in your own home, but it’s perfectly shot and edited and the snow-crunching sound design is immaculate. Dead simple and just phenomenally well put together. Get that man some fondue.

Real Football.

We’re going to be a little cheeky here. Usually we use this section of Cut Culture to shout out some of the incredible work made by our industry colleagues, but just this once, we’re going to feature some of our own work. And we think we can get away with it for one simple reason: who doesn’t love the FA Cup? Sure, lots of people bang on about ‘the magic of the cup’, but what does that actually mean? It means that the FA Cup is the best and oldest cup competition in the world’s most popular sport, and it represents the very best of football because David can - and very often does - beat Goliath. There’s always one team that outperforms what probably even they thought they were capable of. It is these Cinderella stories that make all the minnows of the beautiful game believe that this year, they could be that team. We produced this video for Mitre, who are a brand that embody what real football is all about. Forget the oil-baron billionaires and team-hopping Johnny-(and Sally)-come-latelys, this is the pure, unadulterated passion that you can only get from a proper cup tie. Keep an eye out for what we’ve got to come for the 5th round. Cough Did someone say giant-killing at Goodison park? Cough…

BTS

Germanic efficiency meets Euro joie de vivre: Kappa have just announced that they will be BWT Alpine F1’s official apparel partners. What that means, in layman’s terms, is that whenever anyone in the team isn’t wearing a fire-proof suit, they’ll be kitted out in Kappa. It also meant that they needed some content to launch this new partnership, and that’s where we came in…

We were tasked with bringing to life the campaign idea of Re:Generation, celebrating both brands’ histories of coming up with bold, iconic, innovative firsts (Kappa did the tight football shirts before they were cool…).

The shoot itself naturally came with its challenges, but none of which involved changing four wheels in four seconds, so our pit crew can’t complain. We shot at the bottom of a 7-story underground car park with no power, no signal, and ramps that were very clearly and inconsiderately not built with F1 cars in mind. But we did manage to borrow a vintage GTA from an Alpine enthusiast who was willing to be paid in cups of tea and sausage baps. Legend.

Speaking of legends, one of our models, Marcel, deserves a special mention for stepping up last minute and smashing it after we woke up with 25% of our talent out with Covid.

By the end of the day, we had enough content for a full stills campaign and 15, 30 and 60 second film edits ready to be launched on all social channels. Bit of a race against time, but we were working with an F1 team after all…

Radar

Hayley Lai - Art & Set Director

Hayley Lai is an art director, set designer/director and creative stylist. Basically, whatever it is, she’s the person who’s going to make it look sick. You probably already knew that just from peaking at the brief smattering of some her work above. You won’t be surprised then to know that Hayley has done some massive campaigns for some of the biggest names in fashion, including Selfridges. She always adds a unique and distinctive aesthetic to her sets and is someone we had been hoping to work with for bloody ages. Thankfully, we got our wish just last week as Hayley brought an opulent Polish palace to life for our shoot with JD Sports and Puma featuring this bloke called Aitch (you might have heard of him). That’s dropping imminently, so watch out for that in the next Cut Culture.

Head over to Hayley’s Instagram to check out more of her work.