Rab Zenith BTS
Rab asked us to produce a film and a stills campaign to launch their new Zenith Jacket - a great light weight packable waterproof jacket. Perfect for keeping in your bag and pulling out when needed, hill walking or scrambling, the features are designed to suit both activities. Our mission was to create a film that showed all the benefits of this jacket in an epic environment.
So we proposed a one day adventure where our protagonists starts low in a valley setting, and scramble up to a summit view.
Naturally our one challenge was, how are we going to dictate the weather? With these kinds of shoots you really want to avoid shooting over the course of two days as matching the light can be a tricky thing to achieve, so really you want to shoot as chronologically as possible in one day - as if you are truly shooting documentary style.
We decided to pick the Nufenen Pass in Switzerland, as our main “summit” location. The beauty of this pass is that you can nearly drive to a high altitude, and not have to physically climb a big distance. This way we could pick our spots carefully, giving us more time to jump from one location to the next. We also found a forest and river relatively close by.
Now all we needed was a day of variable weather. We carefully tracked our various weather apps and we made the call to shoot as late as possible the evening before to try an guarantee the forecast. Thankfully the day couldn’t have worked out better. The morning was sunny clear blue skies (at one point we feared the clouds would never come), and then as if by clockwork they arrived just on time. As we had begun our scramble up to the summit, an pretty epic storm was brewing slowly in the distance.
It might sound a bit irresponsible to be shooting high up on a ridge in what could turn out to be a lightening storm, but as we had chosen a location that was close to the car we knew we could get down quickly and safely. Nevertheless, we kept one eye on the storm and one eye on the shoot.
It was a great day out, and for once not too strenuous with lugging heavy camera gear up the mountain - something we are so accustomed to doing. We also got to enjoy a double rainbow at the summit! All in all a memorable day on the mountain.