Vol. 18
It’s the last Cut Culture of the year, so we’re going out with a bang. We’re bringing you an oil-painted paragon and a slightly depressing history lesson. And since it’s Christmas, we’re throwing in an extra video as we flick through the pages of our own 2022. We’ll also take you behind the scenes of our Christmas campaign for USC, before closing things out with an intro to one of our favourite long-time collaborators. See you in 2023.
Cut Culture
Class of 2022.
Closing the book on 2022. It’s been a proper page-turner.
Shout out to everyone who came along for the ride. We’ve got some big things coming in 2023. Stay tuned…
Just Don’t Stop Oil.
Despite having been around for about 60 years, The Beatles and their time-withstanding cultural cachet don’t appear to be going anywhere any time soon, with two animated music videos having just been launched to mark the release of a new expanded edition of their ‘Revolver’ album. The real challenge, therefore, was not deciding whether the videos warranted a place in this month’s Cut Culture, but deciding which one would have to be left out. The unfortunate omission was a bold typography-based effort by illustrator, artist and filmmaker Danny Sangra, which you can still check out here. This means our winner is Em Cooper, who created this music video for ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ using the unfathomably laborious process which she has made herself known for: creating rotoscoped animations with oil paintings. Cooper achieves a distinctive fluid effect by hand-painting every frame - an undertaking which took months to complete and required working on an animation rostrum on sheets of celluloid, producing a total of 1300 oil paintings. For that amount of effort alone, it would be worth its place in Cut Culture even if the end result were completely sh*t. Fortunately, that isn’t the case: it’s an ethereal, lucid dreamlike thing of absolute beauty.
Theory of Devolution.
A lot has changed since that first over-ambitious amphibian decided that it was sick of swimming so sprouted legs and started walking about (I’m no evolutionary biologist, but I’m fairly sure it happened something like that). However, some things have stayed fairly consistent throughout all of human history: the perhaps most pernicious of which is our proclivity for fighting one another. As soon as we had neighbours, we were either worried that they were scheming to take what was ours, or we were scheming to take what was theirs, or even more likely, we were scheming to take what was theirs because we were worried that they were scheming to take what was ours. Steve Cutts’ new film brings this unfortunate trait of human psychology to life in a mesmerisingly chaotic, 3-minute-long Hobbesian nightmare that takes us from the days of cavemen attacking each other with sticks right up to to the current crop of cavemen attacking each other with nukes. It is truly remarkable how much better we have become as a species at killing one another as we somnolently tiptoe towards our total extirpation. And, according to this video, even after that point we’ll still be psychologically condemned to want to bash one another on the noggin. So much for Rousseau’s ‘Le Bon Sauvage’. We’ll stop naming philosophers now…
BTS
USC is the home of the original icons - so we threw them a house party for after the party finishes and only the WhatsApp group are invited back.
We had a 2 day shoot, with day 1 being the supposedly simpler of the two to capture just product shots. We say ‘supposedly’ because this was complicated slightly by a series of locked doors and not-so-helpful gatekeepers, but once we actually got into the flat, things couldn’t have gone much smoother (this is also why you arrive early, just in case…).
Day 2 was the big one when we had all the models come down to capture the lead AV and stills. Needless to say, this was a busy day. We were based across 2 neighbouring flats: 1 with a set designed by our set designer, stylist and art director; and the other to act as a sort of base/HQ/place to take the occasional deep breath.
But after a couple minor alterations to the schedule, we managed to wrap in good time and captured everything we needed and more. Well, most of us wrapped in good time - the closing confetti canons meant a couple hardcores had to stay and clear up. All in a day’s work, right? Right? Although some of us are still finding glitter a few weeks later…
Check out the final film and stills below. And keep your eyes peeled in the real world too, as USC brought out the big-guns in store with a mix of static and AV displays, complementary window dressing and in-store fixtures.
Meet Dan. The fact that we hadn’t already featured him in Cut Culture is frankly just bad manners on our part, as we’ve been working with him for the best part of a decade (around the time the two cavemen from Steve Cutts’ video started fighting). But now that he’s fresh off of editing a bunch of our videos for the MLB and Cake, it seemed like as good a time as any to throw him into the mix. As a predominantly AV and motion graphics guy, the limitations of our website format don’t exactly help us do Dan’s work the credit that it deserves, so do yourself a favour and go to his website or Instagram to behold it all in its full glory.