Olympus – Break Free

Which is exactly what we did, in partnership with Lehigh Mining & Navigation, for the Olympus “Break Free” campaign.  Rather than fly to every corner of the globe, lugging gear up mountaintops, we sat back and spent that time sifting through oceans of images and video to find the perfect shots. 

“It was challenging to weave together shots from all over the world and tell a consistent story.  We decided to look for consistent threads in composition which helped us curate our selected shots.  It was easy to let the visuals do the heavy lifting, but it was still a complex edit.” – Howard McCabe, Creative Director

Aside from featuring the work of Olympus fans worldwide, we gave a more prominent role to a few sponsored photographers – featuring their work, and even themselves, in mini-vignettes punctuated throughout.

“Blending video in a spot mainly composed of stills isn’t easy – it generally sticks out like crazy.  But we decided to use a parallax effect on almost everything which helped tremendously as we were able to direct the motion from shot to shot.” – Rick Malwitz, Senior Designer

Underscoring original, unique visuals can be tricky – so we went with a custom score, written and performed direct to picture.  “We wanted the whole spot to be special, to be unique. So there was no choice but to add our own score.” – Howard McCabe, Creative Director 

In the end it all came together, like the perfect shot.  The campaign included a :60, as well as :30 and :15 cutdowns, for web and TV.