Cutters Opens New Studio in Kansas City

Back in August, 2017, Cutters Studios announced the opening of a satellite studio in Kansas City. Resulting in high profile collaborations for numerous brands including Dairy Queen, Gatorade, Big O Tires, Frigidaire, Kansas City Ballet, S'well Water Bottles, Tropicana and Wendy's, that exploratory test flight built around editor/partner Matt Walsh, editor Dustin Kaufman and a handful of others proved highly successful. Today, the company is unveiling its full-force studio in the city, with more news about the high-calibre talents and technologies sure to set it apart.

For its star talents, Cutters Studios Kansas City (CSKC) will be home to new company editors Morgan Bradley and Kalen Kirkpatrick. Honoured by AD2 San Francisco among its top young advertising leaders for 2018, Bradley has been a staff editor for Beast for the past ten years, spanning the company's West Coast and Chicago operations. With recent commercial credits for Audi, Fitbit, Nike, Sephora and Twitter, and wide recognition for her artistry through Free The Bid, Bradley is a KC native who is thrilled to be returning to her hometown, thanks to Cutters.

"I've long admired Cutters and the creativity and opportunities it fosters," Bradley explained. "I still can't quite believe the next step in this career adventure is taking me back home, and I couldn't be happier. There's no doubt in my mind that we are at the right place at the right time."

With his relocation to KC, Kirkpatrick is being promoted to the editor position, following four years as a coveted assistant editor for Cutters in Chicago. A Film and TV graduate from SCAD, Kirkpatrick has excelled in honing his craft under the guidance of many acclaimed Cutters editors, while earning awards recognition and contributing to major commercial and feature film projects.

"Excited doesn't begin to describe how I am feeling about the promotion to Editor and the move to Kansas City," Kirkpatrick admitted. "I've gotten to learn from the very best in the business, while working with the best clients around. I'm grateful for the opportunity and ready to continue to grow the Cutters Studios presence here in KC!"

CSKC now spans three highly specialised suites in the Crossroads Arts District's renowned Austin Walsh Studio. Engineered to leverage the full power of Cutters Studios' global talent-base – as well as its complete arsenal of post-production expertise, spanning post-production audio with Another Country, plus design, animation, VFX, colour-correction and high-end picture finishing through Flavor – CSKC's state-of-the-art offerings match and extend company facilities in Chicago, Detroit, LA, New York and Tokyo.

Along with full-blown edit suites for Bradley and Kirkpatrick, CSKC's Digital Theater represents the new studio's crowning achievement. CSKC's expanded colour grading capabilities – with colour correction in Lustre, driven by Autodesk Flame Premium, and many other industry-leading technologies – and its post-audio environment are second-to-none.

"Over the past 18 months, we've built some phenomenal relationships with the amazing agency talents in Kansas City, and we've seen first-hand that the market is a great fit for us," Cutters Studios managing director Craig Duncan began. "We've already proven we can contribute to stellar work here. Moving forward with our expanded offerings and two exceptional editors, we are very excited to see what happens next."

"Whether a situation calls for providing remotely supervised workflows through our other offices with creatives based in KC, or having our artists directly available in KC for sessions, we are now able to produce and deliver work of even higher quality," said Flavor's executive producer Neal Cohen. "By providing our KC-based agency partners the exact same systems used by all of our finishing artists – all within a sound- and colour-calibrated Digital Theater – we're making our commitment to this market crystal clear."

Specifically in the realm of sound, Another Country's executive producer Tim Konn is also eagerly anticipating the next-level collaborative opportunities. Through a similar Digital Theater in Tokyo, he and his colleagues have remotely collaborated in real-time on projects for AIG, Facebook, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota, Visa and VW, and their agency partners. "Up until this point, we've done a lot of sound design and mixing with clients in KC through traditional remote means (postings, emails, calls, etc.)," he said. "Now, we can invite them to sit in the comfort of our new CSKC Digital Theater and work in real-time with our talent in Chicago and Detroit."

Reels for Morgan Bradley, Kalen Kirkpatrick and all the Cutters editors are available here.