“Sorry I can’t, I’m in Zambia.”
That was the message we received when we invited Jon Lister for the first August Men of Tomorrow shoot. He was there to shoot a branded documentary for the BBC Storyworks (you can see some of the shots captured on his Instagram account @jontravelist).
For those who know Jon, this isn’t new. As part of his work for CreatorsLab, the content production company he co-founded, Jon has travelled the world, telling engaging human-centric stories with arresting visuals.
After graduating from the University of Plymouth, he began work as a Producer for a small record label in the UK. He concurrently launched an underground radio station called eatmusic and ran it until April 2011. It was then that his adventures into the bigger world begin. “In 2009,” he recalls, “I travelled to the Himalayas to record an album of Buddhist monks in a cave in Ladakh. En-route, I had a massive seizure from altitude sickness. I was advised to avoid high altitudes, and I ended up helping a charity in Dharamsala produce a documentary. The film helped launch my video career when I moved to Asia in 2011.”
He only brought a backpack with him to Asia, but ended up staying for over a decade. Specifically, he moved to Hong Kong to work for a travel media company called Insider TV. He served as Creative Director and Producer for three years, before moving to Singapore as Head of Content. Having successfully led the content department of Asia’s largest destination video content network, Jon was eventually invited to sit on Insider TV’s board of directors.
But the time came for Jon to truly spread his wings.
“In 2018 I decided to quit, and after a couple of years of freelance nomadism, founded a production house (listedcreative.com), and then co-founded CreatorsLab.” Through CreatorsLab, he made Chefs Uncut, a documentary series that tells the untold stories of Asia’s best chefs, highlighting their creativity, passion, and dedication to their art. Chefs Uncut features the likes of Chefs Janice Wong and Bjorn Shen.
It was a passion project borne from his love for food. You wouldn’t be able to tell if you looked at Jon. The man looks more Spartan Race than Greek Yoghurt.
When we pointed this out to him, he replies, “Ha! Because it looks like I don’t eat that much? I do have to do a lot of exercise to stay afloat! The truth is, I have always loved food. It’s always been one of the main reasons I travel, and is probably what drew me to living in Asia, where the food – from street to fine dining – is quite simply better than anywhere in the world. Singapore has been my home for ten years and I think as a foodie, few places in the world are better to live & have a base from which to travel to eat.”
The creation of Chefs Uncut was as much a work of passion as it was an exercise in being relentless. Once he found the right people to make it happen, Jon pushed hard for it to go through.
He shares, “A year or so ago my co-founder and friend, Arijit Sengupta, who is from private equity – he’s a Partner at B Capital – suggested we make a film together. We had a shared love of food, and LG Han was a good friend of his, so we made a super honest, uncensored film telling his story.”
From there, things hurtled along rapidly. “The next minute, we had founded CreatorsLab, partnered with distribution company Bomanbridge, and before we knew it, we had distribution deals with Netflix, SBS Australia, and others. Our goal is to build a platform that tells the stories of chefs around the world who don’t get the coverage we think they deserve and Chefs Uncut couldn’t be a better launchpad to make that happen.”
True to his relentless nature, Jon is nowhere near done. “As well as Chefs Uncut, we have many other shows in development and am super excited to see where CreatorsLab goes in the future,” he says.
Going by how awesome Chefs Uncut is, we don’t want Jon to stop, either.
