Adam Moran: Mountain Dew

BY Wonderful Machine 5 July 2017

This past winter, Los Angeles-based photographer Adam Moran teamed up with Fuse Marketing and Mountain Dew to create a library of images to showcase their product along with their sponsored athletes. Adam had worked with Fuse and Mountain Dew in the past and had already shot a great deal of snowboarding that winter, so when this project came along, he was thrilled to accept.

The goal of the campaign was to create a library of images centered around the Mountain Dew Snowboarders and a specially constructed winter snowpark on the back side of the Grand Targhee Resort in Wyoming. Named Peace Park, the course was also to be used as a stop on Mountain Dew’s professional skiing/snowboarding event, the Dew Tour.

Peace Park was a fun, creative environment where the pros were able to snowboard without any the stress of their normal competition schedule. My goal for the images was to get great action and lifestyle pictures that Mountain Dew could use in all their marketing collateral. I mainly focused on professional snowboarder, Danny Davis because he was the brainchild of the innovative park.

The pre-planning for the course and the shoot was done months ahead of time because there were a lot of moving parts. As mentioned earlier, Danny Davis was the driving force behind this event/shoot, and he conceptualized the whole thing with Fuse and Mountain Dew. Having known Danny for a long time, Adam had always been impressed by the snowboarder’s attention to detail — his work on this course was no different.

Danny spent months working on the course and its layout to get it exactly right ahead of time.

After the course had been conceptualized, the folks at Snowpark Technologies in Tahoe, built features like rails and boxes and had them trucked over to Wyoming. It took a few weeks to create all the jumps, all the quarter pipes and combine them with the pre-fabbed features, but the work paid off. It needed to be perfect for when some of the world’s best snowboarders showed up.

Since the course was a huge, full-length ski trail, Adam and his crew needed to spend a day scouting spots and angles for the final pictures.

When everything was set, Adam planned a window of four days for the shoot. The timeline was relatively large because he knew he would need to work around the unpredictable alpine weather.

Even though the shoot was in the springtime, a full snowstorm shut us down completely for a full day. Fortunately, it happened after two full days of shooting, so I think the athletes were ready for a break, and we even got to shoot some lifestyle pictures in the process.

While working with the athletes, Adam gave them some time to warm-up and get acquainted with the brand new course. Once they got a good feel for the park and its features, the shooting commenced.

The athletes themselves chose which features to hit and what tricks to perform, so Adam just needed to document the action as it went down. Once they were done riding, Adam pulled the different athletes aside to get specific lifestyle shots.

When you have over 10 athletes riding together on a huge course it can be tough to narrow things down and focus on specific features, but as you see them focus in on certain areas, you have to be there ready to get it when they are.

As the shoot progressed, Adam loved seeing the riders constantly push each other to do bigger and better tricks.

As the days went by, the tricks got better and better and I just needed to catch them as it went down. I also worked with the riders on certain shots and communicated with them about what might look best on certain obstacles.

In all, Adam had a great time on this campaign. The reaction to all the images has been positive and Adam looks forward to working with both Fuse and Mountain Dew again moving forward.