REI has its finger squarely on the pulse of the aspirations of its audience, its culture and community. Our goal was to capture this community connection through a journey into the different ways that it’s community gets away from the computer and office to #optoutside. It became clear that the best way to achieve this was through the authentic user generated postings of Instagram users themselves, so we did just that.

We utilized a search engine called curalate helping to wrangle 3.3 million images generated across the globe into one place for us to edit from. We appropriated the postings of real people to show that REI connects people not only to the outdoors, but to each other as well. Our focus was on those connections as we set out to draw that community even closer, joining them linearly in a stop-motion video. The pictures we used instantly communicate the adventures, the inspirations and spiritual ascensions that occur in the days spent outside. It was up tot us to craft these stories from the millions of images at our fingertips, to create beautiful, fun-filled journeys inside of each film.