Camp High Rocks

Cedar Mountain, NC

Media Type: Brand Story
Client or Agency: Camp High Rocks
Producer: Heath Cowart
Creative Concept: RDP Concept Design Process (adapted to camps)
Camera: Canon Cinema Cameras, Canon DSLRs (steadycam, timelapse), Panasonic GH4 (4k drone footage), GoPro Hero 4 Black
Editing: RDP Collaborative Editing Process on Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Adobe After Effects CC
Location: Cedar Mountain, Transylvania County, Western North Carolina

Needless to say, we had a great time creating the Camp High Rocks video. How could you not enjoy spending your summer days on this cool and breezy, 1100 acre mountaintop playground? Capturing the High Rocks experience involved hanging off of rocks to capture climbers, standing in rivers to get the best angle on kayakers, running next to mountain bikes trying not to trip and destroy our camera equipment, and for our cameraman Dan, literally trying to outrun and not get trampled by a crazed group of campers.

Our home base in Western North Carolina put us in the middle of the highest concentration of summer camps in the world. There are literally hundreds of summer camps in our mountains, each with it’s own personality, it’s own focus, and traditions.

Producing a summer camp video that stands out from all the others both in quality and effectiveness can be challenging, here is why.

First and foremost is the importance of video to summer camp marketing. Video marketing and summer camps are a match made in heaven and the camping industry figured this out before just about anyone else. So as individuals and as an industry summer camps are very experienced producers. They have decades of experience using video to communicate their values and our challenge is to bring them something new and fresh that delivers unlike anything they have tried in the past.
The second challenge comes with the importance of clearly showing the unique personality of the camp. Ultimately viewers will want to know what makes this camp different from all the others and why that is good thing.
The third challenge is that we are communicating to 2 very different audiences at the same time. Campers and camp parents. It is important for each to be fully engaged in the whole video and be able to understand the unique perspective that we are communicating to each.

In order to achieve this we took our system that we use on all videos to do an analysis of the goals, target audience, and strategies, but we adopted it to fit summer camps. Now we have a system to help us tackle the unique needs that summer camp video brings.