Vol. 16
Cut Culture returns. This time round we’re looking at haughty couture and a psychedelic swim through space that would simply not be suitable for under-18s. We’ll also take you back to Barcelona for a peak behind the scenes of our latest shoot for PUMA, and last but not least, we’ll close the show with an intro to a DOP who you really ought to get to know.
Cut Culture
Full Metal Jackets.
Since joining Gucci as creative director in 2015, Alessandro Michele been responsible some particularly memorable fashion campaigns. His work is often laden with historical and pop culture references, and this month it was revealed that Stanley Kubrick would provide the inspiration for Gucci’s latest collection, aptly entitled ‘Exquisite’. Despite being by all accounts a bit of an odd bloke, Kubrick was a hell of a filmmaker, celebrated fairly universally for creating some of the most-loved masterpieces of the 20th century. Perhaps, as often seems to be the case, his eccentricity added to his genius - like Ainsley Harriott. A self-proclaimed cinephile, Michele talks about how he sees all of his collections as “films able to convey a cinematography of the present: a score of stories, eclectic and dissonant, that can sacralise the human and its metamorphic ability.” Blimey, he’s making me feel bad about my £3 Fruit of the Loom t-shirt.
Post Production Malone.
When a music video opens with a disclaimer that it may trigger seizures for those with photosensitive epilepsy and that viewer discretion ought to be advised, you know you’re in for something pretty special - assuming of course that you don’t suffer from photosensitive epilepsy. That is the very warning that precedes Post Malone’s latest video, which is a trippy, intergalactic adventure produced in collaboration with Rick & Morty creators, Adult Swim. Adult Swim x Post Malone is a combo that the world didn’t know it needed, but is certainly glad that it got. While most of the credit will understandably go to the team at Adult Swim and their weird brains, Post himself ought to be credited for giving them a brief and allowing them to just run with it. Rather than creating a new style specifically for Post, the music video was pitched as a straight-up Adult Swim treatment in a fairly ‘take it or leave it’ fashion. And take it he did. So just sit back and enjoy a 3-minute-long ethereal love story. Oh, and if it looks like they worked hard on it, just know that Adult Swim’s SVP Creative Jacob Escobedo claimed they designed all the characters in one night “while eating noodles in the Adult Swim writer’s room”.
BTS
Welcome to the RS-FAST experience… Let’s Play.
This is PUMA’s boldest and fastest silhouette to date, so we had to come up with a concept that translated this to JD’s audience. So, we created an immersive, choose your character-style launch piece, adopting a video game style and featuring nods to iconic aesthetics such as Need for Speed, while still placing the trainer front and centre. And, as it turns out, a crucial part of that vision involved getting a stuntman to do donuts in a classic Mustang around some models. No brainer…
In addition to our stuntman, we had a POV helmet cam to create that ‘Player One’ feel, as well as an FPV drone and a pilot skilled enough to be trusted not to total some fairly expensive equipment. Speaking of fairly expensive equipment: we shot this in a car park in Barcelona and saw several poor sods’ cars get towed, really putting the ‘pain’ in Spain for those unfortunate people.
But in more positive news: at the end of the day we’d captured content for a full product launch with campaign stills, AV retail, social, and product shots. Well worth getting absolutely caked in dust.
Radar
Meet Jules. One of our regulars, a friend of the agency, and most importantly, A DOP with a distinctive, raw aesthetic who we have had the good fortune to work with for years now on more than a couple sport and lifestyle campaigns. This brief smattering of stills doesn’t begin to do his work justice, so we implore you to head over to Jules’ Instagram to get the full effect of his AV work.