We spent four days in Moab chasing the Valor Offroad team from trail to trail, and we came home with enough content to carry them for a year.
That sentence makes it sound tidier than it was. Chasing is the right word. The drivers do not slow down for cameras, and we wouldn’t want them to. Most of the Valor team are employees of the company. They spend their working weeks designing, selling and installing wheels and tires, and then they go out and drive on them the way their customers do. So for four days our job was to get ahead of them, get set, get the shot, pack up, and do it again at the next spot while riding with them.
We wrote a while back about what an install video tells you about influencer marketing in the offroad arena. The short version: this audience trusts people who clearly know the product and will show it working, and a polished ad doesn’t move them. Moab was the same idea pointed at a brand’s own people. Valor Offroad makes UTV wheels and tires, and the people in these videos are the ones who work on them. Nobody had to act like they knew the product.
By the last day everybody was tired and everything we owned was the color of the dirt. We called it a marathon about halfway through and the name stuck.
Why shoot a year in four days
A trip like this is expensive to set up. You have to get our cameras, their machines and their drivers into the same venue at the same time. Once all of that is in one place, the cheapest thing you can do is keep shooting.
So we didn’t plan the trip around one video. We planned it around a calendar of content. Every trail was a chance to bank something different: wide scenic passes, tight driving shots, wheels and tires up close, the team talking between runs, the small moments nobody scripts. We were shooting for next spring and next fall as much as for next week.
It changes how you work on the ground. You stop asking “did we get the shot?” and start asking “how many different posts is this stop worth?”
The temptation to dump it all
When you get home from a trip like Moab with drives full of footage, you want to post all of it right away. The client is excited, we’re excited, and the footage is sitting there looking great. We understand the urge. BUT… it’s a mistake.
A dump gives you one good week. Your audience sees a burst of posts, likes a few, scrolls past the rest, and then your feed goes quiet again until the next trip. Most of what you shot gets a fraction of the attention it would have had on its own, because it was competing with your other posts from the same afternoon.
Dripping the same footage out over months does a few things a dump can’t:
- Each piece gets its own day. A clip that would have been the ninth post of the week is the only thing you published that Tuesday.
- You stay in front of people. Somebody shopping for a UTV build in March has no idea what you posted in October. They see what you posted this week.
- You can respond to what works. If one style of clip takes off, you go back into the footage and cut more like it. After a dump you have nothing left to cut.
- You can match the calendar. Footage held back can go out alongside a product launch, a sale, or the start of riding season, when it will do the most good.
- The budget stretches. One trip spread across twelve months costs far less per post than twelve small shoots.
The drawback is that it takes patience, and patience is hard when the footage is this good. Holding back a great clip for four months feels wrong the day you do it. It feels a lot better in month four, when you have something strong to post and didn’t have to go shoot it.
A marathon after the marathon
The four days in Moab were the sprint part, even if they didn’t feel like it. The year that follows is the real marathon: cutting, scheduling, and putting out Valor Offroad content at a steady pace long after the dust has been washed off the gear.
So if you follow Valor, you’ll be seeing Moab for a while. That’s on purpose.
If your brand has a trip, an event, or a shoot coming up and you’d like to get a year out of it instead of a week, get in touch with Bypass.