At the beginning of this year, we proudly featured our first cinema commercial.
Working with two of our favorite artists and collectives, Yu-Chen from Taipeh and 199x from Nairobi the concept was to capture the "love for life" on an authentic super8 cinema camera. The artists were free in their interpretation of the topic and use their own language and artistic style. The final result could not have made us more happy and proud and we wanna deeply thank Yu-Chen and 199x for their tremendous work!
As paradoxical as it may sound to some, smoking and the love for life go hand in hand for us, and our entire vision is to smooth that contradiction by offering a far less harmful, beautiful alternative to the tobacco cigarette: An understated electronic cigarette that uses technology exceeding the state of the art to preserve the aesthetics of its tobacco ancestor.
While the whole idea of shooting on a super 8 camera seemed easy at first it entailed Philipp from our team to travel to Nairobi. He happily did so and had an amazing time in Kenya making friends, giving valuable inspiration and eventually transporting the film roll safely to Switzerland so it would not be x-rayed at the airport. Should you want to embark on such a project yourself, please feel free to reach out to us for advice ;)
Yu Chen
Yu Chen’s pictures appear like atmospheric scenes taken from a Wong Kar-Wai movie. The coarse grain of the analogue camera and the brilliant utilization of urban settings lend a distinctive style to her photographs. Yu Chen is based in Taipei.
199x
Because we fell in love with their playful yet mature style, the wonderful color choices, and creative sets, we had initiated contact with 199x in 2019 and have been working with them ever since. As a multi-dimensional visual arts company, 199x is based in Nairobi and specialises in Fashion and Film.
