Search Results for: Cutters

Out of the 58 category winners at the 58th Chicago/Midwest Emmy Awards held last Saturday, Dec. 3 at the Chicago Marriott Downtown, 11 were production/non-broadcast companies whose programs aired on local television.

Among those non-station golden statuette awardees was post house Cutters Studios. 

Award-winning Cutters commercial editor / partner Kathryn Hempel, who edited the internationally acclaimed video, “Like a Girl” for P&G’s Always/Leo Burnett, is one of four by Women in Film Chicago Focus Award honorees, Thursday, Jan.

Corks are popping at Cutters and toasts are being made in honor of assistant editor David Rubin and assistant audio mixer Mike Regan who won two out of the three Grand Prizes at the 2015 AICE international Camp Kuleshov competition.

For the last five years, Cutters has hosted a legendary Halloween costume party, aka “Blood Bath,” that had became so wildly popular that last year’s estimated 2,300 guests had to line up and wait outside the party venue to join the fun.  

At Wednesday night’s 14th annual AICE Awards ceremonies in LA, Cutters and Optimus were voted the Best among US and Toronto editors and postproduction experts competing for the 32 winning slots.

Cutters Studios’ editors and designers in four of its offices made a big splash as finalists for the 2015 AICE Awards, ranking second only to Rock Paper Scissors in the number of nominations it received.

After a 15 year absence including 11 years working for a bicoastal editorial company, producer Heather Richardson decided it was time to come home.  On Jan. 5 she joined Cutters Studios as one of two producers on the editorial side.  

Cutters Studios and its design division Flavor were among four post houses that came away with top awards from the AICE Awards gala presentation in New York last Friday – one of them being “Best of Chicago” for an IBM spot edited by Michael Lipper for VSA Partners.

Cutters is doing Chicago proud in the 2014 AICE Awards by having scored seven nominations, out of 90 US/Canadian nominees in 30 categories.  Cutters and Beast, with two finalists, compete for the Best of Chicago, and Cutters/Detroit made it into Best of Detroit.

The AICE Awards presentation will be made at Gustavino’s in New York, May 15.

Cutters’ Flavor design division expanded again to 12 with the addition of Flame artist Christopher Elliott, who moved after a 16-month stint at Utopic and a decade at Red Car Chicago, with the title of director of finishing at both.

Flavor has a staff of 12 with Elliott, its third Flame compositor and finishing artist, working alongside Elliott is Flavor’s third Flame composite and finishing artist, working alongside motion graphic and 3D artists.

Designer Claudia Chagui moved to New York from Chicago on Jan. 2 and barely had time to hang up her clothes before stepping into her new role as creative director and business lead for Hint, an experiential design firm. 

Today’s the day that Cutters Studios officially throws open the doors of its fittingly stylish New York office down in trendy SoHo – the first Chicago post/production company to expand services in the advertising capital of the world.

Cutters’ executive producer Craig Duncan’s organizational and client relations skills and efforts in putting the post/production house on the expansion fast track over the past three years have earned him a partnership in Chicago’s biggest post/production company.

When he heard that L.A.-based SuperFad design studio had closed, Cutters Studios’ CEO Tim McGuire wasted no time in hiring SuperFad’s two highly regarded design specialists for Cutters’ newly revised design division.

IF ADVERTISING’S DARK SIDE is displayed in “Mad Men,” then CBS’ new series, “The Crazy Ones,” is a 180-degree turn to a sitcom made even zanier by the return of the original mad man, Robin Williams, who made his TV debut in “Mork and Mindy,” way back in 1978.

It was like coming home, a warm reunion of good friends and colleagues, for senior editor Louis Lyne when he joined the Cutters Detroit 10 days ago, reuniting with Craig Duncan, Cutters Studios’ executive producer and Mary Connolly, Cutters Detroit EP, who earlier had worked together at Griot Editorial.

Cutters’ editor Ryan McGuire is a busy guy.  Last Friday, he presided over the opening of Cutters new Tokyo office; on Monday he greeted his parents, Ellen and Tim McGuire, sister and brother who flew in from Chicago to attend his wedding Wednesday at a shrine in Kyoto.

Two years in the works, Cutters’ new office is, to the best of their knowledge, the only foreign-run post house in the Japanese market, which is second only to the US in the amount of TV spot production.

In an a seismic personnel move, The Whitehouse’s A-list editor Matt Walsh, joins Cutters March 1 as a partner/editor.  He becomes Cutters Chicago’s tenth editor and the total company’s nineteenth, among all its offices in Santa Monica, Detroit, Tokyo and Chicago.

Walsh had been with The Whitehouse for 11 years, starting as a runner back in 2001 and working his way up to assistant. In 2006, he was promoted to editor and has been blazing a trail ever since.

Cutters Detroit and sister company Moonlink are sharing the unique dual skills of new arrival Jim Talbot, possibly the only combination editor/DP among Detroit production/post companies. His addition brings Cutters Detroit’s editorial staff to five.

Award-winning Talbot, who is considered a very respected and high-end editor, joined the companies two weeks ago after a 21 year Detroit editing career.

Cutters’ current expansion knows no bounds.  Chicago’s biggest post company has just implemented its L.A. operation with two high-profile editors and a Chicago-transferred assistant editor and shortly will be seeking Asian business for its new Tokyo office.

 Already a part of the Detroit post scene with its partnership in RingSide Creative, newly established Cutters Detroit is creating its own identity in the Motor City’s multibillion dollar ad market in its own new offices in the RingSide facility in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park.

Cutters Detroit has a staff of six, headed by executive producer Mary Connolly, who was recruited from Griot Editorial, where she worked for 12 years, starting as a rep and moving to a producer’s position.

Tim McGuire’s Cutters, one of Chicago’s biggest and most established production/post houses, just got bigger.  It finalized the acquisition last week of integrated media studio RingSide Creative, LLC of Oak Park, Michigan.

Cutters purchased RingSide in partnership with Detroit’s Steven Wild’s Wild Acquisitions and Brian Efrusy of RingSide, who continues as the company’s CFO.  

The Radio Mercury Awards, hosted by the New York-based Radio Advertising Bureau and now seeking entries, has named Chicago adman Mark Gross, partner / CD in Highdive Advertising as its 2017 Chief Judge.

Trade associations AICE and AMP (Assn. of Music Producers) have teamed up to launch PrePro, a new mentorship program to help local high school and college students explore careers in post and music for advertising.

The PrePro diversity program, open to students age 17 to 23, will kick off this coming semester in the active Chicago and New York chapters. Other chapters will follow as the year progresses.

IF YOU LOVED JOHN HUGHES’ MOVIES you’ll be especially engrossed in the first book ever written about the “philosopher of adolescence,” as Roger Ebert once called him. Jason Diamond, who like Hughes was a North Shore native and suffered painful teen years, has authored “Searching For John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know About Life, I Learned from Watching 80s’Movies.”

The top three winners of Tuesday’s annual Midwest Independent Film Festival’s (MIFF) “Advertising Community Shorts Night,” out of 17 finalists, will compete for MIFF’s “Best in the Midwest Awards” Tuesday, Dec. 6 at Rocket Bar & Grill.

First prize in the Shorts contest went to “Exonerated,” a look into the lives of five people who had spent 23 years in jail for crimes they did not commit. Chicago commercial photographer Andy Goodwin directed and Patrick Duffy of Cutters’ Detroit office edited.

The 7th annual Ad Community Shorts Night at the Midwest Independent Film Festival will screen Tuesday, Nov. 15 instead of its regular First Tuesday Nov. 1 date, deemed as being too close to Nov. 8 election night. They are:

“Hell,” John Malkovich reads Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” while illustrations depicting humans’ worst atrocities animate edited, graphics by Ryan Gilbert and sound design by Brian Leitner.

A wide swatch of Chicago post house assistant editors, graphic designers and audio mixers – 17 in all — were winners in the annual AICE international Camp Kuleshov trailer Competition among all AICE chapters.

Chicago chapter winners were announced Oct. 18 at the Fremont Chicago restaurant and nightclub in River North, attended by some 200 staffers of AICE Chicago’s 23 member companies. Aice. org

The 2016 Chicago/Midwest regional Emmy nominations were announced this week simultaneously in Chicago and Milwaukee this week – more than 200 recognitions in 41 categories of broadcast programming.

Winners will be announced at the 58th annual Emmy Awards ceremony Dec. 3 at the Chicago Marriott Downtown, 540 N. Michigan.

Highland Park-based Bitter Jester Creative garnered six Crafts Achievement Off-Air category nods; October Productions scored three. On the broadcast side, Fox overwhelmed with a record 27 nominations.

VETERAN AD MAN RON BESS, who in August was named president/CEO of Hy Connect agency, was just appointed CEO of the agency’s ownership entity, Boston-based Myelin Communications, which bought the Chicago office of Hy Connect last year.

Four-year old Myelin, owned by Chicago’s Baird Capital, is a network of companies specializing in health and financial services. HY Connect’s accounts include Blue Cross Blue Shield and Indiana University Health.

The feature getting rave reviews as it makes the festival rounds is a notable first for both writer / director Ned Crowley, more famously known as McGarryBowen’s US chief creative director, and Cutters’ senior partner/editor Chris Claeys.

Airing throughout NBC’s 2016 Rio Olympics coverage is McDonald’s new 60-second “better” Chicken McNugget spot, promoting the fast food chain’s decision to remove all artificial preserves from its Chicken McNuggets.

In the split screen depiction, a young boy (Zachary Rifkin)in the left screen growing up in the ‘80s interacts with a young girl (Echo Campbell) of the in present on the right screen, set to a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” sung by Iron and Wine.

Filmmaker / editor Gail Gilbert’s short film, thriller “Democracy in the Driver’s Seat,” will be one of 14 women-made shorts showcasing at the Midwest Independent Film Festival’s annual Female Filmmakers Night, Tuesday, Aug. 2.

The distinguished filmmakers have been at their craft for many years, are producing an impressive body of work and possess a large collection of prestigious international awards.

The entries are:

“We did ourselves proud last night,” says Tom Duff, AICE Chicago chapter president, “not only in award-winning but in putting on a great show” – the 15th annual AICE Awards at Navy Pier with an audience of 500.

Chicago had had three top winners out of the Awards’ 33 categories.

Best of Chicago was awarded to Beast’s Angelo Valencia for DigitasLBi spot for Whirlpool.

The Colonie won twice: Brian Sepanik for GrubHub / Tandem, Inc., in the Dialog / Monolog / spoken Word category and Keith Kristinat for 71 Degrees North / Chevy Trucks in the Spec Spot category.

Competing against some of the best editorial/post talent in the US and Canada, Chicago companies made a stellar showing in the list of finalists for the AICE Awards May 12 at Navy Pier.

Optimus, Cutters, The Colonie, Beast and Particle/Comma have a combined total of 13 nominations out of 84 craft categories, and the Best of Chicago.

Chicago agencies and post houses overwhelmed last week’s International Television Awards, scoring 10 out of 12 top awards for excellence in TV commercials. The awards were held Wednesday, April 20, at the AMC River North theatres before a full house.

The Whitehouse post scored four awards and Leo Burnett earned three.

Legendary longtime Avenue Edit talent Terry Kaney will be inducted into the AICE Hall of Fame at the AICE Awards May 12, in the Grand Ballroom at Navy Pier where 81 editors will be honored in 27 categories.

DDB Chicago’s award-winning Diane Jackson was elevated to the newly-created and wider-ranging position of Chief Production Officer, from EVP/Director of Integrated Production.

She has headed an award-winning production team since rejoining the agency in 2007 and will continue to report to DDB CCO John Maxham. 

The AICE Awards will celebrates their 15th anniversary in Chicago next spring, with the presentation taking place at Navy Pier, May 12, and the call for entries has gone out.  Deadline is Monday, Feb.

With its new space in an historic Sears building in North Lawndale, Free Spirit Media now has five locations to help urban youth from under-resourced communities gain life, academic and professional skills through media production and journalism.