Vol. 34
Cut Culture is back, and this time we come bearing mile-high safety videos and product launches that’ll make you feel high. From the sky to the sea, we’ll then give you a peak behind the scenes of our Powerade shoot in Barcelona with a boat load of Olympians before finishing up with an intro to the latest photographer to go from our Radar to your feeds.
Cut Culture
Kentucky Fried Confusion.
Thai cuisine may be some of the finest the world has to offer. Pad kra pao, papaya salad, tom yum. Need I go on? That last one even has yum in its name. But even amidst such abundant gastronomic delights, fried chicken reigns supreme. In a world that feels perhaps more divided than ever, crispy skin is universal. The planet might be a safer place if only our leaders could be coaxed into gathering around a bargain bucket. And when you’re talking fried chicken, it’s impossible not to bring up KFC. To launch their new ‘Uncle KFC’s Rice Bowls’, KFC Thailand created a 5-minute long, surrealist fever dream based on the age-old dilemma of deciding what to have for dinner. We’re here for it. And we think Colonel Sanders looks particularly dashing as a Loong. “By bringing out the Thainess in Uncle Sanders, we’ve broken through the global brand barrier,” says director Teerapol Suneta, “It’s like East meets West”. Certainly worked better than Perestroika. I’m lovin’ it. Shit, wrong one.
Plane Eyre.
Nobody watches in-flight safety videos. You know you probably should, but you just don’t. Sure, anything can happen to anyone… but it usually doesn’t. You figure that nothing will go wrong and even if it does you’ll just figure it out. But in-flight safety videos are there for a reason, so the task to get travellers to pay attention to it is by no means a trivial one. Previous attempts to inject a bit of personality into these videos have been at best a bit try-hard and at worst unbearably cringe with painfully strong ‘I’m the kooky one’ energy. Now, British Airways have offered a change of pace by journeying back in time with ‘A British Original Period Drama’. With Bridget Jones’s Diary director Sharon Maguire at the wheel (of the ad, not the planes), the film draws inspiration from British period literature, film and TV and features a cast of 40 real BA employees. Hopefully they got paid overtime and the Victorian approach didn’t extend to the workers’ rights. Now we feel perfectly well-equipped to emergency land on water. Or shoot a pheasant.
BTS
You might be thinking “the Olympics has finished, why are you showing us this now?”. Well, if you’d be so kind as to shut your trap for a moment, we’ll tell you. The true Olympian spirit goes the extra mile. It pushes on where other yield. It keeps talking even when everybody’s left the room. So that’s why we’re sharing this now… and not at all because we forgot last month and wanted to wring some extra content out of it.
Allow us to take you all the way back to 2023. We flew to Barcelona for a 5-day shoot with some of Powerade’s ambassadors, including Alberto Abarza, Emma Twigg, Harrie Lavreysen, Mathilde Gross, Tyler Wright - all of whom possess superhuman abilities to make mere mortals like us feel like indolent slobs who probably didn’t need a second visit to the buffet breakfast.
From mopeds mounted with cameras to improperly attired photographers sent wading waist-deep in the Mediterranean… it wasn’t for the faint hearted. There’s that Olympian spirit we mentioned yet again…
We’re not trying to take any credit, but after we shot him, Harrie Lavreysen went on to win 3 gold medals and set 2 world records in Paris. And now he’s in Cut Culture. Things just keep getting better for the bloke.
Check out out film with Harrie below, and for the rest, go feast your eyes on the Powerade Instagram.
Jamie Shipston-Mourn. He’s a photographer we’d had on our radar since he really burst onto the scene a few years ago, and just last week we finally got round to working together. He has a dynamic style that is very obviously and distinctively his, masterfully manipulating movement and light for maximal vibes and vibrancy. And that was precisely why he was the only logical choice for our recent shoot with The North Face and JD Sports, bringing the quintessentially TNF spirit of exploration into an urban environment. Look out for that in a Cut Culture coming to a screen near you soon…
If you want to see more of Jamie’s work, check out his website and Instagram.