The Caves of Utah

This past September I was fortunate to go to Utah to oversee a promo shoot for our show Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch. I love this show and I have done every promo campaign for its four seasons. The ratings for it have grown each year, and so it has been rewarded with further investment. For season one we executed a clip based concept, but for seasons two and three we did a promo shoot on location, and we were more ambitious with each one. The most recent one is no exception. We went to multiple locations, including within a couple caves, and captured a wealth of great material for on air promo, social, digital, and press. 

Our concept was about pushing deeper. In a literal and visual sense. We showed this by having our talent navigate into the depths of a cave. The concept also captures the nature of the show's central plot; a hunt for treasure somewhere underground, and the emotional state of the crew trying to complete the task. They have now become obsessed with their quest and are pushing themselves deeper into something like madness. To express the mental state of the talent visually, we turned to the snorricam, a rig in which the camera is mounted to the subject and pointing back at their face. This makes for a slightly disorienting experience for the viewer, as  the subject appears stationary while the space moves around them. Only their reaction can give us a clue as to where they're heading. 

We also filmed the environments themselves. We flew a drone into a cave to get an eerie, inhuman motion through that space. We filmed elements in slow motion; dirt falling off of bone, or breath caught in the light of a headlamp. I loved this shoot because we were able to get what we needed for the story of the promo, as well as improvise additional content we thought of in the moment. We did this in coordination with the show's production company and small crew of three people, which made for an efficient use of our budget, and an excellent adventure for me.