The ambition for Snow 2025 was simple: get Ruroc back onto a real mountain, with real snow, real athletes and the product being used in the environment it had been designed for.
The previous Snow campaign had been produced in a studio, largely because of budget constraints, and while that gave us complete control and allowed us to make the campaign efficiently, there was a feeling internally that the next one needed to return to the mountains and feel genuinely rooted in snow sports again.
The difficult part was that getting back onto a mountain wasn't simply a case of choosing somewhere we liked and booking flights, because before we could really start thinking seriously about locations, the first challenge was product. Development and sign-off were taking longer than originally planned, samples weren't ready when we had hoped and, as those dates continued to move, the production window moved with them, meaning that by the time we were in a position where the campaign could realistically go into production, we were looking at late October into early November.
That immediately changed the conversation because instead of choosing a mountain purely around the creative, we now had to find somewhere that could genuinely give us the conditions we needed that early in the season, while at the same time dealing with the very clear commercial reality around what we were trying to do.
There was around £50,000 originally available for the production and that number needed to cover considerably more than simply putting cameras on a mountain. Flights, accommodation, athletes, crew, local production, equipment, transport, resort access, insurance, food, permits and post-production all had to sit within the same overall number, so the location decision was tied directly into what the wider business was prepared to sign off.
There were a lot of conversations internally with the directors and board around what level of spend was realistic, where the money genuinely needed to go and what we could sensibly commit to without turning what was supposed to be an ambitious campaign into something financially irresponsible. For me, that became one of the biggest parts of producing the job because the creative ambition was clear, but I needed to find a production model that could actually support it, understanding where we could simplify, where we couldn't afford to compromise and, most importantly, making sure the restrictions behind the production never became visible in the finished work.
James Camp became a really important, integral part of those early discussions.
I'd worked with James for around five or six years by this point and he had considerably more experience than me in this type of mountain environment, but more importantly he was someone whose creative and practical judgement I trusted completely. The two of us spent a lot of time talking with the internal team and people outside the business about where this campaign genuinely had the strongest chance of succeeding, with James incredibly patient while I learnt the nuances of a production environment that was still relatively new to me.
One of those outside voices was Rob Machon, whose background made him almost uniquely useful to the conversation. Rob had come through competitive freestyle skiing before moving increasingly behind the camera, and by then was working as a filmmaker and photographer while also examining ski instructors in Verbier, so when we were discussing where the campaign should live, he wasn't looking at a mountain like a location scout who happened to ski, he understood it from inside the sport.
Between James's experience, Rob's insight and the conversations we were having with others around the industry, we weren't simply looking for the most recognisable resort or somewhere that sounded good in a campaign deck, we were trying to understand where, at that particular point in the year and within the money available to us, we were most likely to get the conditions, access and visual scale that the creative actually needed.
A number of European glacier resorts came into the conversation, with Tignes amongst the locations we explored early, although as the dates continued to move even the word "glacier" couldn't simply be treated as shorthand for a guaranteed solution. The wider glacier options still gave us a stronger early-season argument around altitude and snow coverage, while also naturally delivering the visual language we had originally been discussing, with huge open mountain environments, distant peaks, big expanses of white and that feeling of athletes being small within the landscape.
That scale mattered because the campaign wasn't only about showing product clearly, it was about putting the product into the world it belonged in and allowing the environment itself to become part of the story.
But another location kept being pushed internally: Ruka, Finland.
There were understandable reasons for that because Ruka is well known within snow sports, it had a strong training park, a number of the athletes were familiar with the area and there was clearly some brand value attached to being able to say that Ruroc had gone to Finland to shoot. The park itself was designed to support early-season skiing and top-level training, but that was also exactly where James's and my concern sat because having a functioning park didn't automatically mean the surrounding mountain would have the natural snow coverage or landscape the campaign treatment required.
Our concern was never that Ruka wasn't a good location, it was whether it was the right location for this particular piece of work at this particular point in the season. Would there actually be enough natural snow beyond the prepared areas, would we get the full mountain coverage everyone was imagining and would the landscape give us the scale and open vistas we'd been discussing, or were we beginning to choose a destination because there was already a desire to go there and because, internally, it had become the easier route to keep moving?
That became one of the bigger lessons of the entire campaign for me, and it had less to do with snow than it did with accountability.
There comes a point in businesses where a decision develops momentum and challenging it becomes harder than simply going with the flow, particularly when everyone is busy and the path already in front of you is easier operationally. I remember feeling that we were getting dangerously close to fitting the creative around a destination rather than choosing the destination around the creative, effectively trying to push a square peg into a round hole because the organisation had already started moving in that direction.
It would have been easier to stop questioning it, get on the plane and say we'd done our bit, but I've never believed that is what accountability looks like in a creative business. Sometimes protecting the brand means being the person asking an awkward question for the fifth or sixth time, because going with the flow might be easier for the people in the room but it doesn't necessarily produce the best answer for the work, and if the evidence, experience or creative is telling you something isn't lining up, I think you have a responsibility to keep challenging it until everyone is consciously accepting that compromise rather than simply drifting into it.
James was pivotal here because he wasn't interested in agreeing with something simply because it was the direction the business wanted to move in, and he repeatedly pushed us to look at what the location could actually give the creative rather than what we hoped it might give us. His knowledge allowed him to question decisions with substance behind the challenge and, once it became apparent that Ruka was going to happen, he was equally important in making sure we stopped trying to force the original idea into an environment it wasn't naturally suited to and instead began shaping the strongest campaign around what Ruka could genuinely offer.
That is something I've always admired about working with him. We push each other, we disagree when we need to and we challenge each other's thinking, but I know that underneath all of it we're trying to protect the same thing, which is the best expression of the work. Having that relationship with a colleague is rare enough, having it with someone who is also one of your closest friends is something I'll always be grateful for.
There were proper discussions around the location and good arguments on different sides, which was exactly what made the decision difficult. The glacier routes offered stronger options around early-season mountain conditions and naturally suited the original stylistic direction, but they brought their own operational and financial compromises, while Ruka gave us established early-season ski infrastructure, athlete familiarity, a recognisable snow-sports destination and the potential to work efficiently with people already operating there, although accepting it meant taking on a very different type of environmental risk.
Eventually the wider team committed to Ruka and it wasn't the location James or I would have described as the obvious answer if we were judging purely on the original creative references, but once the risks had been raised, understood and the decision had been made, the conversation had to change.
At that point my job wasn't to spend the next month proving another location might have been better, it was to make the decision we'd made work as hard as it possibly could.
That's an important distinction for me in production because challenging something doesn't mean refusing to move on when you don't get your own way. You make the risk visible, you argue for what you believe is right for the work and make sure the decision is being taken with the right information in the room, but once everyone understands the trade-off and the direction is agreed, you get behind it properly.
So the question stopped being whether we should shoot in Ruka and became how we could give ourselves the strongest possible chance of succeeding there.
The weather became slightly obsessive viewing in the days leading into the shoot and, for a while, it looked uncomfortably close, then almost as we were travelling north the snow arrived. James later titled his own field notes from the production North Until We Found Winter, which was probably about as accurate a description of that week as you could get.
By the time we arrived, the landscape had started transforming into the Ruka everyone had imagined when Finland was first discussed, snow was sitting in the trees, the mountain was opening up visually and suddenly the environment we'd been worrying about for weeks was there in front of us.
The gamble had paid off, but that didn't suddenly make the production straightforward because Ruka introduced another restriction that was going to dictate almost everything we did on the ground.
Time.
There was more literal daylight than four or five hours, but once you accounted for lift access, moving around the mountain, getting athletes and equipment into position, the low northern sun, changing conditions and the kind of light we actually wanted to photograph and film in, we were effectively dealing with around four to five genuinely useful shooting hours each day.
On a mountain that changes your relationship with time completely because you don't have the luxury of a controlled studio environment where something can slip by an hour and you simply work an hour later. Every movement costs you and thirty minutes can suddenly become a significant percentage of what you're going to achieve that day.
That made the decision to work with Duotone locally incredibly valuable. They supported the Finnish side of the production, including local knowledge, resort access and the practicalities of working around the mountain, which meant we could build around people who already understood the environment rather than flying absolutely everything and everyone in from the UK.
It helped financially, but it mattered just as much operationally because knowing where we could go, how quickly we could get there and what was realistic in the conditions saved time we simply didn't have to waste.
James and I had also realised that the amount of content the business needed was going to be impossible to approach as one traditional unit, because alongside the campaign-led film and imagery there was a huge social requirement that needed to feel native to the mountain rather than like scraps gathered around the hero shoot.
We therefore structured the production around two units, with one concentrating on the campaign-led work and the other continually capturing social-first material around the athletes, product, mountain and everything happening between the larger setups.
Elliot became an enormous part of making that work.
He was running Snow social at the time, understood the brand from the inside and, crucially on this job, was a seriously capable skier, so he wasn't a social media person who had to wait at the bottom of the slope for something to happen. He could move with the athletes, understand where to be and what was worth capturing, and in practice became almost a co-director on the ground, taking real ownership of that second unit and allowing James and me to concentrate on the larger campaign requirements without social becoming an afterthought.
That decision ended up having a far bigger impact than simply giving us more content from the week, because the amount and variety we brought home continued feeding Snow communication for well over eighteen months afterwards. For me, that became one of the strongest examples of what good production planning can do commercially: rather than seeing campaign and social as two different shoots fighting over the same budget, we designed the production so both could happen at the same time, using people who understood exactly what each channel needed.
Rob then became another one of those people who changed what the production was capable of.
Having helped us during the location conversations, he agreed to come to Finland and shoot with us essentially pro bono, asking only that we cover his accommodation. That's an extraordinary thing for somebody with his skill set to offer a commercial production, particularly when you understand that he wasn't simply another photographer standing on the side of a piste with a long lens.
Rob could ski, properly.
His background as a competitive freestyle skier and his later work educating and examining other ski professionals meant he could move around the mountain at a level that allowed him to stay with the international and Olympic-level athletes we were shooting, camera in hand, rather than having to wait for them to come back into a predetermined photography position.
That changed the imagery we could get because he could go toe-to-toe with the athletes on the mountain, understand what they were about to do and use the same language they did when explaining what he needed from them. There wasn't a translation layer between photographer and athlete, he understood the movement, the terminology, what was technically difficult and where he needed to put himself to capture it, which gave us an incredibly valuable set of assets that I don't think we'd have brought home without him.
We were fortunate with the people around us in that respect. James had the experience and creative judgement to keep adapting the campaign, Elliot could take genuine ownership of the B unit and move through the environment as a skier rather than simply a content creator, Rob could photograph athletes from inside the action, and Duotone gave us the local knowledge and infrastructure that stopped the mountain itself becoming an obstacle.
We needed all of it, because then the product problem came back.
Ironically, the same issue that had pushed the production into such a late shooting window still hadn't completely been solved by the time we reached Finland, with a significant amount of the collection not ready when we travelled and a large proportion of what we were there specifically to capture not arriving until day three of a five-day production.
Even when that delivery came, we still didn't have absolutely everything, with some pieces missing and others needing alterations before they were genuinely camera ready.
That left us in a slightly surreal position because we had spent months debating whether Finland would have enough snow, the snow had eventually arrived, we had international athletes, crew, cameras, local production, access to the mountain and a very limited shooting window each day, but we didn't necessarily have the product we were supposed to be photographing.
At that point the original schedule stopped being particularly useful as a fixed plan and every day became about what we physically had in front of us and how much value we could extract from it. If a product hadn't arrived, that scene moved; if an athlete was only available within a particular window, we looked at what product we did have that could work with them; if conditions were right in one part of the mountain, we had to decide whether to take that opportunity immediately rather than wait for a schedule written weeks earlier to tell us it was supposed to happen tomorrow.
Looks moved, locations changed, athletes shifted around and priorities changed constantly, with every one of those decisions affecting something else because the useful shooting window was so restricted. Again, this was where having James and Elliot around me became critical because I wasn't having to make those decisions in isolation and then explain them to people who didn't understand the reason behind them, we were looking at the same problems, understanding what the campaign needed and continually reshaping the day around the strongest opportunity in front of us.
That was probably where all of the planning before the shoot mattered most.
Producing isn't really about writing a perfect schedule and then protecting it at all costs, because by the time we were in Finland I was trying to hold the whole production together as one moving system, with the budget, crew, flights, accommodation, athletes, equipment, transport, insurance, resort access, local production, product, weather, communications, schedule, food, permits, post-production and contingencies all affecting each other.
A delayed product could change an athlete schedule, changing the athlete could change the location, changing the location could cost shooting time and losing that time might move another scene to the following day, which could then affect somebody else's availability, all while everything still had to fit inside the production budget that had already gone through the business and been signed off.
At a certain point, the original schedule stopped being the thing I needed to protect and the campaign became the thing I needed to protect.
What absolutely had to come home with us, what could move without weakening the work, what could be simplified, where could we compromise and where would that compromise start showing up on screen?
Those questions became far more useful than trying to force a production back towards a plan that reality had already changed, and having people around me who I trusted to answer them honestly became just as important as the planning itself.
Despite everything that moved around us, we delivered it.
Five days in Finland, international and Olympic-level athletes, flights, accommodation, local production, equipment, transport, insurance, food, permits, mountain access and post-production, all coming in at under £42,000 all-in.
That number matters to me, not because I think the cheapest production is automatically the best production, but because of how much that money had to achieve. The budget influenced almost every decision we made, from where we could go and how we structured the crew to how long we could realistically be there, who we worked with locally and how much contingency we could carry, yet I don't think you see those restrictions when you look at the finished campaign.
You see athletes on a real mountain, snow, scale and product being used in the environment it was built for, while behind the hero work sits enough social and supporting content to continue giving the business value long after those five days in Finland had finished.
That is the part of production I find most interesting, not simply spending less, but making the money work incredibly hard for the result and knowing where spending, people and planning genuinely add value to what the audience eventually sees.
There was one part of the production that did leave me disappointed, though, and looking back I think it belongs in this story because it changed how I think about the word community.
Rob had given his time and expertise to the shoot without charging the business his normal commercial fee, brought a combination of skiing ability and photography that massively strengthened what we brought home and did it because James had asked him to help us. Yet afterwards I didn't feel Rob's contribution, or James's role in bringing him into the production, was acknowledged in the way it deserved, and there wasn't the gesture of thanks or appreciation that I personally felt should follow somebody giving that much to the work.
That was difficult for me to reconcile with a business whose language had always placed a lot of emphasis on friends and community, because for me a value like that only really means something when it's visible in how you treat people when you no longer need anything from them.
It wasn't really about a gift or a freebie, it was about acknowledgement.
Rob didn't help because he was expecting something at the end of it and James didn't bring him into the production looking for praise, but culture is built in those small moments. Someone gives you their time, expertise and goodwill, helps make the work better and asks almost nothing in return, so you make sure they leave knowing that contribution mattered.
That experience strengthened something I believe much more now: brand values aren't what is written on a wall or in a deck, they're what people experience when nobody is making a campaign about them.
Looking back at Snow 2025, what stays with me most isn't really any one problem, it's how one decision kept feeding the next. The product wasn't ready, so the production moved later, which made snow certainty more important and changed the location debate; the early-season mountain options created different creative, financial and logistical compromises; Ruka solved some problems while introducing others; the snow eventually arrived but the location gave us a compressed useful shooting window, and the product was still delayed, so the schedule then had to move continually around the time, people and kit we actually had available.
Nothing existed in isolation and every compromise had a consequence somewhere else.
That's probably what the finished work never really shows because you watch a campaign and assume there was a relatively straight line between the idea and the final film, when in reality there almost never is. Behind it are budget discussions, board conversations, disagreements around locations, changing product dates, weather forecasts, athlete schedules, local partners, compromises, favours, contingency plans and a lot of decisions that nobody outside the production will ever know happened.
The Producer sits somewhere in the middle of all of that.
You can't control whether the snow falls, you can't make unfinished product suddenly appear and you can't manufacture more useful mountain light, but you can understand the risks early, challenge the things worth challenging, surround the problem with the right people and make sure that when something changes, everyone still understands what you're ultimately trying to protect.
We took a calculated risk on Ruka and I think it's important to acknowledge that rather than looking back afterwards and pretending it was always the obvious answer, because it wasn't. There were other approaches that arguably aligned more naturally with the original creative and there were legitimate concerns that James and I felt weren't always being listened to as closely as they should have been, but there were also reasons the wider business wanted Ruka and, once that decision was made, the responsibility shifted from arguing about it to ensuring the work was as strong as it could possibly be.
Going with the flow will nearly always be easier, but if your responsibility is the brand and the work, being agreeable cannot be the objective. You challenge because you care about the outcome, you make the trade-offs visible because people deserve to understand the decision they're making and, once the decision has been made, you put the ego away, get behind it and do everything possible to make it succeed.
The snow came almost exactly when we needed it, the product eventually followed, the two units kept moving, the schedule changed constantly and after months of decisions and five fairly intense days in Finland, everything we needed came home with us, along with a library of work that would continue serving the brand long afterwards.
For me, Snow 2025 became less about learning how to produce a snow campaign and more about understanding what good production, good collaboration and good accountability are actually there to do.
