Vol. 17
Halloween has been and gone but Cut Culture is sticking with the spooky, as we shine a light on an animated, alcoholic, haunting homage. We’ll also go behind the scenes of our shoot for the ECB - featuring half the England women’s cricket team crammed into a house in South London - and finally we’ll close things out with an intro to our favourite stylist, who we assure you isn’t in the least bit frightening.
Cut Culture
One Take.
To use a technical term: Loyle Carner is different gravy. We’ve previously featured music videos in Cut Culture that earned their place on account of the level of complex technical prowess that they demonstrate. But Loyle Carner and Uncanny have taken a different approach for his new track ‘Nobody Knows’. Well, that’s partly true. Clearly, this video is heavily stripped-back when compared to the Adult Swim-animated psychedelic journey through the multiverse that was featured last month - but the deceptively simple and clean result belies the complexity of the processes required to get there. The video uses rare infrared technology to create a vaguely surrealist take on the message of alienation contained within the lyrics of the track. Plus it was shot entirely in one take, which obviously throws up some not-insubstantial issues of its own; namely the attention to detail required and the pressure to - using another technical term - not f*ck things up and have to start all over again from scratch.
Something’s Brewing.
In the interest of candour, we feel we ought to let you know that this month’s Cut Culture was forced into a last minute re-write due to the video that previously inhabited this slot being somewhat tarnished by the utter lunacy and vitriol that has since been spewed by somebody rather too closely associated with it. That feels sufficiently vague. However, just as penicillin was discovered by accident, this enforced shift of fate has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it has brought us to this: Beavertown’s glorious reimagining of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Rime of The Ancient Mariner. The poem is brought to life courtesy of a Looney Tunes x Fantasia-inspired, hand-drawn, illustrated ad set in outer space, resulting in a slightly bizarre but incredibly compelling short film. A rather high-brow approach, we’re sure you’ll agree - especially when you remember that the purpose of the ad was ultimately to get people to drink too much ale over the Halloween weekend. We’re here for it, though.
BTS
Cricket… but not quite as you know it.
We’d already worked with the England women’s cricket team on several occasions in the past, but previous shoots had been quite, well, crickety. We took a different approach this time; getting the players away from the training pitch and into a real-world environment in order to highlight some of the big personalities in and around the team. This shoot was about showing the England women’s cricket team as people, not just as cricket players.
So… naturally, we brought a collection of grassroots, domestic and international players down to a massive house (though it could have been massiver, tbh) down in Deptford. We wanted to create a party atmosphere in line with the idea of getting ready for a night out, which was partially allegorical for the England team getting ready for their upcoming first ever game at Lord’s, the home of cricket (rebranded ‘Our House’ for the day).
After 1 day of filming, including the occasional break-in-play to take in Issy Wong’s legendary Rubik’s Cube skills, we had shot AV & stills for the We Got Game official Instagram channel (check it out…), as well as some BTS and TikTok content. Enjoy.*
*We also learned not to wrap a shoot by letting off a surprisingly loud confetti cannon, as we may have come fairly close to scaring half the England team to death ahead of the biggest game of their lives.
Meet Ellis. If you feel like you recognise some of the images above, that’ll probably be because we’ve previously rammed them down your figurative throats when sharing our work in the past. But this isn’t just an excuse to drum up our old work again, but rather to talk about the stylist who created the looks for those shoots as well as many others. We’ve worked with Ellis for the likes of Mr Q, Mitre, Puma and Bosch - to name a few. And those latter two mentioned aren’t live yet, so keep an eye out for those over the next month. Not to mention that she made an appearance on the other side of the camera as on-screen talent for our Barbour shoot. We won’t wax poetic too much about her work, as it goes without saying that there’s a reason why we keep going crawling back to her over and over - but we would instead encourage you to go take a look at her Instagram or website for yourself.